Minkels has launched the Free Standing Cold Corridor®. The ultra-modular aisle containment design has been developed for both corporate and commercial data centres. The self-supporting construction offers a pay-as-you-grow model for energy-efficient separation of hot and cold air flows, eliminating the need for an initial investment in racks.
The Minkels Free Standing Cold Corridor® is a fully self-supporting aisle containment design. Unlike the norm for the data centre market, it allows isolated corridors to be created without data centre racks.
The aisle containment design is a modular one consisting only of wall panels, roof panels and doors, offering corporate and commercial data centres a cost-efficient pay-as-you-grow model that provides energy efficiency at low startup costs (CAPEX). The far-reaching modularity in the structural details allows the Free Standing Cold Corridor to offer complete flexibility in terms of the racks and the equipment actually placed inside, including storage and network equipment.
Increasingly often, IT functionality such as storage is being delivered as complete rack systems in various sizes. The design of the Free Standing Cold Corridor gives customers the flexibility to fit other types and sizes of racks in at a later date, so that users have the freedom to adapt the Cold Corridor construction as they go along to their evolving and dynamic data centre requirements.
Minkels’ Free Standing Cold Corridor® is compatible with the Minkels Next Generation Cold Corridor®, an aisle containment solution that does use racks to support the structure. The benefit of this is that all the optional add-on modules of the Next Generation Cold Corridor can be integrated seamlessly with the Free Standing Cold Corridor.
The optional add-on modules that are available include:
- Airflow optimisation - for increased energy efficiency.
- Data centre monitoring - with plug & play integration of sensors for monitoring.
- Access security - with various (automatic) door systems.
- Fire safety - for compatibility with a wide variety of fire extinguishing systems.
The Free Standing Cold Corridor is also suitable for application in what are known as ‘retrofit’ situations, in which an existing data centre has to bet given an energy-efficient aisle containment housing, without risking compromising the operational continuity of the data centre.
