[AusNOG] Airflow for Cisco switches in racks

[Radek Tkaczyk]

Hi Guys,

We always mount our network switches in our racks with the switches facing the rear, so that when you cable up servers, you don't have a mess of network cabling going from the front of the rack to the back of the rack. This has worked well for us for the last 10 years or so, but recently with providers like NextDC doing cold isle containment, this means that switches are blowing hot air into the cold aisle, and some people get unhappy with this.

We use Cisco 3750 switches which are 1RU, and they blow hot air out the back of the switches, some models have side-to-back airflow, but it still results in hot air being sent into the cold aisle. I have always thought that this amount of hot air was negligible, and wouldn't even matter in the overall scheme of things, as long as your servers were mounted around the right way.

How are other people handling this situation? I'm not really keen on changing our rack standards and having to re-do the entire cabling for racks across the 4 of our data centres that are using cold isle containment!

Regards,

Radek Tkaczyk
Ph: 0413 383 231

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