In an increasingly global and technologically driven business world, one of the most important rooms in many office buildings is the one that houses the servers, and it needs to be specially accommodated with access flooring.
One of the main reasons for this is cable management; raised flooring creates cavity space for network and power cables to be run underneath the floor. Photographs and videos of early computers such as ENIAC reveal just how important this is.
However, one additional benefit that access flooring can provide is the ability to provide large-scale cooling systems that run underneath the server room and help keep everything working at an optimal temperature.
Here are some of the ways that access flooring cooling works.
Underfloor Cooling
All electronics generate heat whilst in operation due to the effects of electrical resistance, but computers generate a lot more unwanted waste heat than most.
The main reason for this is the density of most modern computers. Motherboards often place a lot of chips remarkably close together for reasons of efficiency, and whilst this does work to ensure systems are cheaper to build and faster in operation, they also generate a lot more heat.
This can lead to computer parts rapidly exceeding their safe operating temperatures, risking permanent damage. Infamously, the Apple III was so bad for this that technical support infamously suggested users drop the computer on the desk to reseat chips that had popped out due to the heat.
This serves to emphasise the importance of computer cooling, and many computer systems use a combination of metal heatsinks, fans and “water cooling” (often using other thermally conductive but not electrically conductive materials for safety reasons) to keep components working at an optimal temperature.
The more effective the cooling system is at keeping components in an operating range, the more densely compacted computer parts and servers can be stored without generating enough heat to cause technical problems.
This is where the unused cavity space underneath a server room’s access flooring becomes incredibly useful.
The hot air can be channelled away from the computer in one direction, potentially to be used for heating elsewhere in the building or as part of a more elaborate heat-exchange system, whilst cool air can be drawn towards components.
This can be achieved using dedicated piping systems or through liquid-to-air heat exchangers that allow cool air to be delivered through an air conditioning system. This is one of the reasons why data centres tend to be kept especially cool.
Because servers typically draw in air from the front of the rack and disperse it at the back, there is a way to create an effective heat dispersion cycle which ensures that they are kept as cool as possible, and part of this involved using underfloor piping to deliver cool air or refrigerant liquid that passes over the parts in question.
In practice, this creates a plenum, and whilst this could technically be done with a false ceiling, it is typically more cost-effective to use a raised floor for this purpose.
