Guidance on Data Center Cooling Includes New Strategy

Data center rack heat loads are steadily climbing, creating a need for liquid cooling solutions to reduce the volume of airflow needed and lower processor temperatures for better computer performance.

To provide best practice guidance for implementing this strategy in data centers, ASHRAE recently published Liquid Cooling Guidelines for Datacom Equipment Centers.

The addition of liquid classes can have a similar effect on the industry as the creation of supply air temperature classes, which was the critical enabler to the use of economizers in data centers. The strategy of liquid cooling could open up possibilities of using rejected heat for building heating systems.

The guide bridges the liquid cooling systems by providing guidelines on interface requirements between the chilled water system and the technology cooling system and on the requirements of liquid cooled systems that attach to a datacom electronics rack to aid in thermal management.

It is available at www.ashrae.org/bookstore.