Proper cooling systems can improve the efficiency of data centers and add to your business.
The world is shifting towards a new, modern digital age. Data centers are the key to a very complex puzzle that facilitates the communication of information throughout the whole world. As businesses, organizations, governments, institutions, and individuals rely on being online, data centers are becoming more powerful than ever. If you’ve ever entered a data center room, you’ll notice the powerful electromagnetic waves these machines produce. These waves do not only heat the room, but they heat the components themselves.
A common misconception about data centers is thinking that a data center is a single machine. But, because a single data center can be composed of routers, switches, application-delivery devices, servers, storage-specific systems, and many other instruments. This whole pack of electronics requires a serious amount of cooling to operate at its best state. Here’s how proper cooling systems can improve the efficiency of data centers and add to your business.
Free Cooling
Considered one of the most minimal and efficient ways to cool data centers, free cooling ensures that the temperature flows from hot to cold points maximizes the efficacy of cooling with minimal use of external equipment. Air-side economization is a system that utilizes air to stabilize the equipment’s temperature, while waterside economization focuses on condensing warm water to absorb the heat before it returns to the system.
Liquid Cooling
Also known as the chilled water system, liquid cooling is one of the most popular, energy-efficient methods to cool data centers. The data center cooling solutions manufacturers at Nortek Air Solutions believe that such resource-friendly cooling technologies are the future of cooling systems in this industry. Without the need to control the airflow to specific areas around the data center, chilled water can be easily controlled to reach critical areas where temperature control is most needed. The water is supplied by a chiller that constantly keeps it at a low temperature. The cold water keeps circulating the system, dumping its heat into its chiller, and then it starts the cycle again.
Hot/Cold Aisle Arrangement
This is a very basic technique that’s usually integrated with other cooling systems to increase their efficiency. Hot and cold aisle arrangement is a technique that involves separating the layout of racks. Most importantly, the separation of these aisles ensures that the air doesn’t experience mixing, which can significantly increase the cooling capabilities of any system.
Immersion Cooling
Immersion cooling is a relatively new way to cool various types of equipment, including data centers. A mineral oil generally referred to as dielectric fluid, zaps the heat of any equipment immersed in it. Since this mineral oil has heat-conducting properties and no electrical conductivity, it’s quite safe and can efficiently transfer heat from the immersed equipment to the liquid. Because of this, it’s often the preferred method than air cooling because it can cool equipment at a much faster rate.
Cooling solutions for data centers are constantly evolving at rapid speeds thanks to the increase in demand for digital services. Service providers are constantly expanding the volume and power of data centers, requiring more effective methods of cooling to keep their systems operating at their full capacity and cut back many unnecessary expenses in the process.
