A Layman's Explanation of the Role of IT Racks in Cooling Your Data Center
Many people see an IT rack as a glorified shelving system. Structurally it is. It holds and separates IT systems, allows them to translate for service, potentially protects them from seismic events, enables high density stacking, and helps to make them look nice and orderly. Thinking past these physical or logistical attributes, the rack can make a big difference in how effective your room cooling strategy is. To understand the difference between a good rack implementation and a bad one, you can probably concentrate on the three most common questions:
How many servers will this rack cool?
Are blanking panels really that important; how can I justify?
Isn’t this serpentine bracket that holds all my cables causing overheating problems?