It is practical and effective to use a purely row based cooling architecture to cool a complete data center even when some of the loads are not located in neat rows. The row coolers effectively provide a source of generalized room cooling, in addition to cooling the rows they are placed in. This approach works when the non-row equipment is a small fraction of the total, which is a common situation.

The approach of using a pure row cooling architecture has a number of benefits when compared with a hybrid approach of room coolers and row coolers. Higher efficiency, lower cost, and the ability to eliminate the raised floor are some of these benefits.

Extensive CFD analysis validates the effectiveness of this approach. APC Tradeoff Tool 12, InRow Ancillary IT Equipment Cooling Calculator, assesses a data center’s ability to cool these loads, given a floor layout, row-based cooling configuration, and IT load attributes and thresholds.

When additional cooling is necessary to support the ancillary loads (i.e., when ancillary loads represent a greater percent of the total load than typical data centers or when the loads are very isolated in an alcove), implementing additional row-based coolers is an effective cooling approach, since the infrastructure is already in place.

Continue reading to learn more about cooling entire data centers using only row cooling.