Across Asia, power consumption has risen as homes and businesses turn up the air conditioning to cope with record warm temperatures.

Environmental cooling is now a necessary cost for organizations. However, there are still ways to reduce operating costs, like updating legacy cooling systems with newer, more energy-efficient ones, and installing Branch Circuit Monitors.

Is It Time for DCs to Replace Legacy Air Cooling Systems?
Typically, air-cooling systems like CRACs and CRAHs last 10 to 20 years. The time may be right for organizations or teams managing data centers built in the 1990s and early 2000s to consider retrofitting or upgrading them.

Heat waves, especially when combined with ageing cooling systems, may increase power consumption and result in cooling load problems. As a result, facilities are at risk of environmental hazards, like overheating, hot spots, or even fires, which can cause downtime and impact their operational reliability.

Regular maintenance and timely upgrades can extend the lifespan of older cooling systems but retrofitting and upgrading enable facilities to incorporate cooling technology advancements. As a result, infrastructures will have more efficient cooling, and teams can better monitor and control facility cooling via DCIM integration with these more modern additions.

Moreover, older cooling systems may not be compliant with the evolving regulations for energy efficiency and sustainability goals, something DC teams need to keep in mind if their organizations want to renew or obtain safety certifications – or if their clients demand specific sustainability and safety standards.

Rear Door Cooling is the Next Cool Trend 
In order to retrofit a cooling system with the least amount of downtime and impact on operations, DC teams can turn to rear door cooling systems or rear door heat exchangers (RDHx).

Because of their compact design and installation, RDHx are the only retrofittable solution to work around legacy data center restrictions, like space or power constraints, or legacy system compatibility issues.

USystems, a brand of Legrand, offers RDHx units with its unique, multi award-winning ColdLogik Rear Door method. This technology allows for the best of both worlds by using 'Air Assisted Liquid Cooling'. As ambient air is drawn into the rack by equipment fans, hot exhaust air is drawn over the heat exchanger by fans mounted in the RDHx chassis.

Heat from the hotter air is transferred to the cooling fluid within the heat exchanger, and then the newly chilled air is released into the room at, or just below, the predetermined room ambient temperature. ColdLogik adaptive intelligence in each USystem Active RDHx manages these processes, allowing most heat to be removed at the source, thus improving overall cooling efficiency. In this way, hot air is prevented from mixing with cooler ambient air in the facility, which reduces hot spots.

Localized heat removal would also eliminate ductwork and other airflow management hardware, which could save facility space and costs (both in installation and maintenance).

With these units, facilities can accommodate high density servers that generate more heat than legacy racks, allowing them to transition to more modern infrastructure as clients' and industries' needs evolve.

Furthermore, deploying RDHx's more efficient cooling units helps ensure a DC's uptime and reliability - maintaining optimal temperatures in the facility can be accomplished more precisely and consistently at the rack level with the units.  The equipment is thus kept within recommended temperatures and overheating risks are reduced, all factors necessary for maintaining client confidence and ensuring mission-critical functions are functioning.

Additionally, RDHx units' high energy efficiency and water savings can reduce the carbon footprint of the DC as a whole. This makes them a beneficial component for DCs looking to align with green initiatives and obtain sustainability certifications could also greatly benefit from them.