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SK0-004 · Question #502

A company has had problems with their HVAC system being able to cool their datacenter as they have grown. Which of the following could BEST be used to help reduce the load on the HVAC system?

The correct answer is B. Replacing traditional racks with water cooled racks. Water cooled racks transfer heat away from equipment directly using liquid cooling loops, which is far more thermally efficient than air cooling and directly reduces the burden on the datacenter HVAC system.

Server hardware installation and management

Question

A company has had problems with their HVAC system being able to cool their datacenter as they have grown. Which of the following could BEST be used to help reduce the load on the HVAC system?

Options

  • AReplacing the CAT5 cables with CAT6 cables
  • BReplacing traditional racks with water cooled racks
  • CTurning off non-critical application servers during non-business hours
  • DTaking the second power supplies out of non-critical servers

How the community answered

(26 responses)
  • A
    12% (3)
  • B
    81% (21)
  • C
    4% (1)
  • D
    4% (1)

Why each option

Water cooled racks transfer heat away from equipment directly using liquid cooling loops, which is far more thermally efficient than air cooling and directly reduces the burden on the datacenter HVAC system.

AReplacing the CAT5 cables with CAT6 cables

Replacing CAT5 cables with CAT6 cables has no meaningful impact on heat generation or cooling requirements - cable type does not affect server or rack thermal output.

BReplacing traditional racks with water cooled racksCorrect

Water cooled racks use liquid coolant circulated through rear-door heat exchangers or direct liquid cooling to absorb and remove heat produced by servers at the source, bypassing the need for the HVAC system to move large volumes of chilled air - this directly and substantially reduces the thermal load the HVAC must handle as the datacenter scales.

CTurning off non-critical application servers during non-business hours

Turning off non-critical servers during non-business hours only provides temporary relief and does not address the underlying cooling capacity problem during peak operational hours.

DTaking the second power supplies out of non-critical servers

Removing redundant power supplies reduces component count but the power savings are negligible and this approach sacrifices fault tolerance without meaningfully reducing overall datacenter heat output.

Concept tested: Datacenter cooling solutions - liquid cooling

Source: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/data-center-designs-physical-infrastructure.html

Topics

#datacenter cooling#HVAC#water-cooled racks#thermal management

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