About the Data Centre: 
Cooling
Keeping IT equipment at the right temperature and humidity is critical to a smooth
and reliable operation.
The Sheffield Data Centre was designed with "hot aisle containment" and a chilled
fresh air supply system. Fresh air is brought into the plant room above the server
room and is chilled before being pumped downstairs. Waste air from racks is contained
and extracted before it can mix with and contaminate the chilled air.
No energy is wasted trying to re-chill waste air from servers, which can be as high
as 35 degrees centigrade!
Water chilled Evaporative Cooling
In November 2009 we installed a building-wide Evaporative Cooler which has now
replaced the conventional air conditioning system.
The water chilled Evaporative Cooler uses only a fraction of the energy the
coventional air conditioners used, reducing our carbon footprint significantly,
saving money, and has fewer moving parts - so less to potentially go wrong!
The new cooler delivers up to 18,000 cubic metres of chilled air per hour
into the server room. Capable of chilling air by up to 12^C depending on the outside
temperature.
Using fresh air from outside the building the system regulates humidity between
50% - 55% and the temperature to under 23^C. Manual controls allow staff to give
the system a boost when required on hot summer days.
The new cooler and air pumps combined use around 75% less energy than the
conventional air conditioning it replaced. For redundancy however we've kept the
conventional air conditioners as a backup. Temperature sensors in the computer room
as well as regular manual checks ensure the system is working effectively.
Hot aisle containment
Planned from when the Sheffield Data Centre was still on paper - hot aisle containment
on the first block of racks was completed February 2010, just after the go-live
of the new Evaporative Cooler.
The results were measurable immeadiately! The
computer room runs cooler, the hot air pumps use less energy, the chilled air isn't
contaminated with hot air causing an imbalance, and it also looks cool!
Hot exhaust air is contained within the space between the back of racks and pumped
out of the room before it has a chance to mix with the chilled air.
Hot air containment was completed soon after on the 2nd block of 10 racks. All
servers now have their hot air extracted and totally removed from the building.
See the blog
For the latest on our cooling - see the blog (www.hahosting.info) for updates!
About the Evaporative cooling system and Hot Aisle Containment used in the Sheffield Data Centre.