Facebook, Inc.

Ali Heydari

Amir Meir Michael

Marco Antonio Magarelli

Seung Hoon Park

To avoid the need to operate in-chassis fans to cool rack-mounted servers in a data center, the data center is arranged into a hot aisle and a cold aisle. The cold aisle is adjacent to a first side of the rack mounted servers and receives cold air from a cold air supply unit. The hot aisle is adjacent to a second side of the rack-mounted servers and has a lower pressure than the cold aisle. Because of the pressure difference between the cold aisle and the hot aisle, cold air flows through the rack-mounted servers, cooling electronic equipment therein, into the hot aisle. Control systems are used to obtain sufficient cooling.

Cooling servers in a data center using fans external to servers

To reduce power consumption and more efficiently cool computing devices in a data center, an air supply unit supplies air from outside the data center to an air handling unit, which cools servers within the data center using the supplied air. Using air from outside the data center, rather than recirculating and cooling air from within the data center, reduces the power consumption of the data center. In an embodiment, a chiller and/or an evaporative cooling system are coupled to the air supply unit to allow further cooling of the outside air before it is circulated. Heat generated by the servers within the data center is collected, for example using thermal pathways coupled to server components, and used by the chiller in an absorption or adsorption process to further reduce power consumption of the data center and allow the air handling unit to further cool the outside air.

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Berkeley, CA, United States of America

Ali Heydari