Telecom central offices need a metric for evaluating and designing the thermal environment to ensure effective equipment cooling without excessive energy usage. This paper presents such a metric: the rack cooling index (RCI). Although the equipment intake temperatures provide a picture of the environment, there is no yardstick for interpreting the data. The RCI has the capacity to change this situation; the index is a metric of compliance with (industry) temperature specifications, where 100% means that the equipment is ideally cooled. More importantly, it allows standardized and unbiased comparisons between different thermal environments. Ultimately, the cost of controlling the thermal conditions needs to be understood. Therefore, a cost metric for cooling the equipment room is reviewed. By incorporating the RCI and cost functions in the design process, it can be shown that a design not only improves the environment but also saves energy. The RCI is currently used to evaluate various cooling solutions as well as develop telecom standards for optimal thermal design of equipment rooms. Other applications include real-time monitoring and design specifications. It has the capacity to support non-technical decision makers since interpreting the index does not require an in-depth understanding of its definition. A design with an RCI of 95% is obviously better than one with 85%
[1]
C. Belady,et al.
Gravity-assisted air mixing in data centers and how it affects the rack cooling effectiveness
,
2006,
Thermal and Thermomechanical Proceedings 10th Intersociety Conference on Phenomena in Electronics Systems, 2006. ITHERM 2006..
[2]
Magnus K. Herrlin,et al.
Rack cooling effectiveness in data centers and telecom central offices : The rack cooling index (RCI). Discussion
,
2005
.
[3]
M. Herrlin,et al.
Method for optimizing equipment cooling effectiveness and HVAC cooling costs in telecom and data centers.
,
2008
.
[4]
Cullen E. Bash,et al.
DIMENSIONLESS PARAMETERS FOR EVALUATION OF THERMAL DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE OF LARGE-SCALE DATA CENTERS
,
2002
.