While room-level containment has been the standard approach for some years inside the data center, rack-level containment has quickly become a critical part of the conversation.

In a recent DCD>Talks episode, Tom Demitras, chief engineer at DDC Solutions, shares his expertise on why changing workloads are making this cooling strategy more prevalent.

Historically, hot aisle/cold aisle containment has taken place at a low density, but it inevitably impacted nearby cabinets in the data center – leading to hot spots or cold spots in a room.

Demitras explains how DDC has taken containment to the rack level, enabling each IT cabinet to have the direct amount of cooling it needs, rather than affecting adjacent cabinets or the room itself.

“That lets you build out a data center in steps rather than having to build out the whole thing,” he says. “The rack‑level containment solves the cooling solution with its own pair of coils and its own cooling fans, and it’s not affecting the cabinets adjacent to it.”

Rack containment offers a series of advantages to operators, including onboard fire suppression and NEMA 3R ratings, Demitras explains.

“If you have an umbrella over your IT gear at each cabinet level, that solves the problem for the room level,” he adds. “It’s localizing the cooling.”

His comments come during a time of fast-paced change for the data center industry, as technology continues to evolve rapidly. As a result, Demitras highlights how operators are worried about their infrastructure decisions not aging well, which is maybe why rack containment offers itself up as a good solution.

“DDC’s rack solution has a roll-in option, where you can roll in an IT rack of standard sizing – most of the major manufacturers are making this,” he explains. “We’re facilitating all of the airside cooling and then connection points for power and the liquid side of the cooling.”

For operators looking to move into rack containment, he advises looking at the ceiling height before considering next steps. This is because newer builds tend to have higher ceilings and retrofit builds have lower ceilings.

“There’s so much equipment going overhead nowadays that people are building data halls taller, so a good place to start is on our S4/S5 series that tends to be cool and the cooling unit is on top,” he says. “With restricted ceiling height, the GPU Vault moves the cooling unit to the side rather than placing it on top.”

Looking ahead, as the adoption of rack containment solutions continues, Demitras expects the market to evolve to develop a range of similar solutions. From a DDC perspective, the company has been developing these products for around 15 years now to solve PUE issues, which are beneficial for areas that have higher power costs.

“With the AI boom and higher densities, it’s made a huge difference to DDC,” he says. “Power densities are going to increase and people will find new ways to build out where power is stranded.”

He predicts that another shift would take place on the inference side, where “you start to see just a handful of cabinets” rather than being a “traditional data center.”

He adds: “A rack-level containment solution, overtime, could be made smaller and cool something that’s 50-100kW across three to five cabinets without trouble.”

As data center infrastructure has to become denser and more complex to support the demands of AI and other disruptive technologies, perhaps rack containment can help to simplify the future.

Click here to watch the full DCD>Talks episode with Tom Demitras.