VEGHEL, Netherlands — Modular data center solutions supplier Minkels.com has announced the launch of its Free Standing Cold Corridor.
According to the company, its ultra-modular aisle containment design has been developed for both corporate and commercial data centers, with a self-supporting construction offering a pay-as-you-grow model for energy-efficient separation of hot and cold air flows, eliminating the need to invest in racks.
This self-supporting aisle containment design allows isolated corridors to be created without racks, for a flexible method of keeping hot and cold airflows separate for extreme energy efficiency that offers the same level of energy efficiency as a standard Cold Corridor design using data center racks. The modular aisle container consists only of wall panels, roof panels and doors.
“Increasingly often, IT functionality such as storage is being delivered as complete rack systems in various sizes,” explains a company rep. “The design of the Free Standing Cold Corridor gives customers the flexibility to fit other types and sizes of racks in at a later date, so that users have the freedom to adapt the Cold Corridor construction as they go along to their evolving data center requirements.”
“The development process involved a major supermarket chain and a large European bank, among others,” says Vincent Liebe, Minkels’ senior product manager. “These customers needed a highly scalable aisle containment solution as a cost-effective way of providing energy-efficient housing for their rapidly growing IT infrastructures. In addition, the design had to be hugely flexible in terms of what it could contain, because they didn’t know what type of equipment or racks would be placed in the aisle containment system in the longer term.”
Minkels’ Free Standing Cold Corridor is compatible with the company’s Next Generation Cold Corridor, an aisle containment solution that does use racks to support the structure, allowing the optional add-on modules of the Next Generation Cold Corridor to be seamlessly integrated. These modules include air flow optimization, data centre monitoring, access security and fire safety.
The Free Standing Cold Corridor is also suitable for retrofit application, in which an existing data center receives an energy-efficient aisle containment housing, without risk of compromising the operational continuity of the data center.
“It’s easy to make those kinds of alterations using the Free Standing Cold Corridor, much simpler than with a customization project,” Liebe added. “It’s more cost-efficient too.”
“You have to see it as a customized solution based on standard products,” Liebe concludes. “This means that the Free Standing Cold Corridor also offers a standard route for upgrading conventional data centers and making them more efficient.”
For more information, visit Minkels.com.
