network racksDid you know that more than 65% of equipment failures in IT are directly linked to temperature conditions caused by inadequate or broken air conditioning in the server room? When most of the equipment in your data center has a single obvious failure condition, it behooves you to spend some time and money to ensure this does not happen. This means both installing a new climate control system and maintaining it as well.

Hot Aisle Containment Systems

The best method of keeping network racks and servers from overheating is by separating them from the heat. Hot aisle containment redirects the hot air generated by servers into a walled-off enclosure. The hot air then gets vented into the cooling system, which controls the temperature of the entire building.

This allows for IT professionals to space out network racks, have more data racks and equipment in one room, reduce heat contamination, and have a more energy efficient system. The big bonus comes in two parts.

Failsafe: When you install a new temperature control system in your data center, it better not fail. If it does, you better hope it has a backup or a failsafe built in. If your hot aisle system breaks and nobody is around to notice, the open air around the servers would take some time to fully heat up. This gives you time to react in the event of an emergency.

Maintenance: IT professionals know how hot a server room can get. If they needed to perform manual maintenance on a conventional system, they would be sweating. This isn’t the case for hot aisle. Besides that, the instruments for gauging temperature today are sensitive and plentiful, making maintenance much easier than in the past.

Hosting data on the ‘cloud’ is no easy job. Data centers run into problems with air conditioning all the time. When servers overheat, they stop working. This can slow the network down and be costly to replace. To avoid potential breakage, it helps to have a protective pocket of chilled air surrounding the servers while the heat they produce is pumped away.