Alternating Hot and Cold Aisles Provides More Reliable Cooling for Server Farms

The creation of "server farms" comprising hundreds of individual file servers has become quite commonplace in the new e-commerce economy, while other businesses spawn farms by moving equipment previously in closets or under desktops into a centralized data center environment. However, many of these farms are hastily planned and implemented as the needed equipment must be quickly installed on a rush schedule. The typical result is a somewhat haphazard layout on the raised floor that can have disastrous consequences due to environment temperature disparities. Unfortunatley, this lack of floor-layout planning is not apparent until after serious reliability problems have already occurred.

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