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APC’s Hot Aisle Containment ensures availablity of services

Queensland Internet solutions provider ECN Internet had experienced rapid growth over the past 12 months. ECN offers a range of Internet services, private network solutions, and voice, hosting and back-up services. It also offers a range of residential Internet products and services.

ECN offers a range of Internet services, private network solutions, and voice, hosting and back-up services. It also offers a range of residential Internet products and services.

“We offer a range of business critical services and our business requires 100 per cent systems availability. If our systems fail, so do our customers - our customers can no longer email, make phone calls, back up vital data or access or protect critical applications and data,” said Mark Garlipp Managing Director of ECN.

Opportunity

To expand its Managed Services business and support the company’s growing data centre requirements, ECN needed to upgrade its data centre infrastructure.

“Our data centre had grown in ad-hoc basis to support our increasing data centre requirements. It got to the point that it was more logical to build another room to support our growing needs rather than add to or rebuild our existing room.”

“We had worked with APC and had used their cabinets, racks and UPS in our existing data centre.

“When it came to designing a complete new data centre solution, we went no further than APC,” said Garlipp.

Solution

ECN deployed APC’s InfraStruxure with a Hot Aisle Containment System (HACS). The solution comprised of 20 racks in two rows, four APC InRow Cooling units and one APC Symmetra 160KVA UPS.

APC’s InfraStruxure solution is an on-demand architecture for network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI). It consists of pre-assembled components including modular and scalable UPS, power distribution units, metered power rails, rack enclosures and cooling units, as well as remote and environmental monitoring.

The InfraStruxure design allows the selection of standardised components to create a solution through modular configurations. This standardisation enables an easily scalable architecture designed to meet changing needs and future expansion.

“The modularity of the InfraStruxure solution means we can easily add equipment to the data centre without impacting the efficiency of the data centre design. This is an important feature for a growing company like ECN,” said Garlipp.

Efficient data centre cooling a key consideration

According to Garlipp, ECN was spending a fortune on cooling in its previous existing data centre because the hot air generated by the equipment wasn’t removed effectively.

“In our new data centre we wanted a solution that was specifically designed to address the treatment of hot air versus cold air,” said Garlipp.

“If you don’t deal with it, you are swimming against the tide. You end up having to over compensate by putting in more cooling than is actually required.

“We spoke to a number of vendors about our requirements, but the only one that had a solution designed to address this specific issue was APC.”

“APC’s Hot Aisle Containment System is the only solution I have seen that doesn’t allow the mixing of hot and cold air.”

APC’s HACS ensures proper air distribution and environmental consistency by completely separating supply and return air conditioning paths; this is ideal for high-density server configurations or data centres where space is at a premium and high rack densities are required.

HACS boasts sophisticated features, right down to the cable access brush strips that block air from escaping through cabling holes.

Ceiling tiles close off the top of the ‘hot’ aisles to prevent warm air from mixing with cooled air and one-way locking doors secure hot aisles while allowing for quick exit in case of emergency. HACS’s modularity permits easy scaling and the energy efficiency derived from better cooling accelerates ROI.

“The only way to effectively cool a room is to keep hot air away from cold air, otherwise it’s just not efficient,” said Garlipp.

“I can’t think how you can build a room now without considering it, especially considering the increasing use of major heat-generating hardware like blade servers.

“When it comes to efficient data centre design, getting rid of the hot air is just as important as getting cool air to the systems.”