Airflow containment has moved from a trend to a best practice and has now become industry standard. Airflow Management represents the forefront of power-saving, cooling technology.
For more information about Airflow Management technology, please examine the case studies and white papers below.

 

U.S. Department of Energy Best Practices Guide for Energy Efficient Data Center Design

The U.S. Department of Energy recommends the use of flexible barriers or other solid partitions to seal the space between the tops of the rack and the air return. These types of airflow containment structures can greatly improve hot/cold aisle isolation while allowing flexibility in accessing, operating, and maintaining the computer equipment. The Department of Energy also suggests that these changes should reduce fan energy requirements by 20% to 25%, and could result in a 20% energy savings on the chiller side provided these components are equipped with variable speed drives.

For more details and the complete Energy-Efficient Data Center Design Best Practices Guide please click on the following link:

https://energy.gov/eere/femp/downloads/best-practices-guide-energy-efficient-data-center-design

 

U.S. Department of Energy Case Study at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory

In a case study performed at the Lawerence Berkley National Laboratory, The Department of Energy found that by installing airflow solutions such as sealing leaks in the floor, adding blanking-plates and installing barriers for hot/cold aisle separation a data center can experience a significant reduction in energy costs. Some of the results of the findings included a 21% increase in cooling capacity, an 8% decreased in fan energy, the ability to increase CRAC unit set points by 3°F and an extended life of existing data center infrastructure.

For more detailed information on the findings of the case study please click the following link:

https://eetd.lbl.gov/l2m2/datacenter.html

 

Google Case Study

Google operates many large data centers as well as other small to medium data centers around the world. This case study published by Google describes a retrofit of a smaller data center implementing airflow containment best practices, and the return on investment which these strategies have produced. For this case study, Google spent a total of $25,000 to optimize the data center airflow and returned a savings of $67,000 per year. This retrofit was done without any downtime and resulted in a return on investment of under a year.

For additional information please click on the link to the case study:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/corporate/datacenter/dc-best-practices-google.pdf