[AusNOG] Airflow for Cisco switches in racks

[John Edwards]

>From the brainstorming-but-i-wouldnt-do-it-myself school of thought,
could you flip the fans around to blow in the opposite direction?

If they then draw air in straight from a cold aisle, it seems unlikely
that you're going to run afoul of some thermodynamic design issue
unless you're running PoE or some other power hog.

The fine folk at the TAC may not agree with this solution, but then
again it's probably not on their troubleshooting checklist either
"customer changed the internal orientation of fans".

John




On 6 November 2015 at 13:19, Radek Tkaczyk <radek at tkaczyk.id.au> wrote:
> 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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