Oracle Wins ASHRAE National Award for Rack Heat Containment
March 4th, 2010
Oracle was presented the National ASHRAE Award for their innovation in cooling data centers. The award was accepted by Oracle’s Energy Director Dr. Mukesh Khattar at the ASHRAE Winter Conference in Orlando, January 2010. The rack heat containment (RHC) method used at Oracle’s Austin Data Center, Austin Texas, occupies 12K sq-ft of space within an exiting white space of 82K sq-ft.
“Adding a ceiling plenum to a portion of the data center can be accomplished with minimal disruption and at a very reasonable cost compared to other alternatives for cooling higher-density loads” said Mark Germagian, founder of Opengate Data Systems and a consultant on this project.
Depiction of the method used at Oracle
“The excessive use of 56% open floor grates greatly effects under floor pressure - even with CFD modeling, it is difficult to predict the effects on local floor pressures due to adding and removing grates” said Mitch Martin, the Chief Engineer at the Austin Oracle Data Center.
With the Opengate EC System and automated containment of the heat load, we never have to run around doing floor tile gymnastics. We can just set the floor tiles down and know there will be no contamination of cool air with the IT heat loads. “We’re putting the Opengate System on all high-density racks coming into Austin” said Martin.
The first generation RHC system pioneered by Oracle is referenced in multiple publications including the ASHRAE High-Density Data Center Best Practices and Case Studies book as well the ASHRAE Journal Article from August 2008.
Photo from the Austin Data Center
The Opengate Systems coming into the Austin Data Center are the second generation RHC systems. “We can eliminate all wasted cooling in the Austin data center”, said Germagian. “The Opengate systems are automated so there is no cool air bypass or hot air recirculation. This allows us to raise the supply air temperature to the upper ASHRAE thermal limit while maintaining just about the same temperature at every rack inlet.”
Photo of newly installed Opengate systems at Oracle
Read more about Oracle’s ASHRAE National Award, “The Dawn of Containment” in a recent Data Center Knowledge Post.