Server Rack Rear Door Heat Exchanger and the New ASHRAE Recommended Environmental Guidelines

The patented [1] rear door heat exchanger mounted to the rear of IT equipment racks was announced in April, 2005 by IBM and has shown improvements in data center energy efficiency and reducing hot spots. It also allows data center operators to more easily implement some of the features of the newly approved ASHRAE data center recommended data center environmental guidelines [2]. This paper will describe several case studies of implementing the rear door heat exchanger in various data center layouts. The implementation of the water cooled rear door in these data centers will show the effects of various failure modes and how the new ASHRAE environmental temperature guidelines are still being met with the failure modes examined.