Integrated Building-Based Air Handlers for Server Farm Cooling Systems

Abstract

The present invention provides apparatus, methods and systems for integrated building-based air handlers for efficient cooling of data centers. Some embodiments of the present invention allow for encapsulation of the heat row through the enclosure and allow one or more cooling fans to be integrally mounted within the rack mount unit for drawing cool air to cool the rack mount mounted in the rack unit and exhaust heated air towards the enclosure wall. In other embodiments, the disclosed system can be used to bring in outside air to cool servers. In some embodiments, in addition to the heat row enclosure, the system also encloses the cold row through the cold row enclosure. The rack-mount unit's cooling fans draw cool air from the cold row enclosure to cool the unit, and expel heated air toward the hot row enclosure. In some embodiments, the control system is used to selectively utilize free cool air to cool the servers. When the outside air is not suitable for cooling purposes, the control system recirculates the heated air from the thermal exhaust enclosure and one or more evaporative coolers are used to cool the heated air.

Description

technical field

[0001] The present invention generally relates to cooling systems for data centers. Background technique

[0002] The rapid growth of Internet services such as web email, web search, web site hosting, and web video sharing has created ever-increasing demands on the computing and storage capabilities of servers in data centers. While the performance of servers continues to increase, so does the energy consumption of servers (even with efforts in low power design of integrated circuits). For example, one of the most widely used server processors, AMD's Opteron processor, runs at up to 95 watts. Intel's Xeon server processors run between 110 and 165 watts. However, the processor is only a part of the server; other parts of the server, such as storage, consume additional power.

[0003] Servers are typically placed in racks in a data center. Various physical structures exist for racks. A typical rack structure includes mounting rails to which multiple units ...

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