| >The design of the Storageworks SW800 is
>Air in: Front and Rear
>Warm Air out: Top and bottom Rear.
The airflow (with the exhaust fans at the bottom) is aimed at
reducing the air pressure inside the plenum between the BA35x
shelves. This gives a greater differential pressure for the shelf
fans to work with, and hence makes them more efficient (or shift
more warm air...whatever your view!!). In other words, the airflow
is specific to the implementation.
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| re: .1
Hello Chris,
I agree..however the conflict is with Sw800 versus AS8400.
We now have 10 x AS8400, 12 x Sw800, 8 X Laser7000 and a bunch of other
AXP,vax small, gigaswitches and other 3rd party equipment.
Movement of the warm air in this computer has become an issue due to
bad aircon and airflow design.
It would have been more practical to have kept to some standard all
cabs either in at the bottom and top or all out at the bottom and top.
Keep well,
Regards
Ivan
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| Hi Ivan,
To answer your initial question - NO, the products were developed
pretty much independently. The looks and the overall formfactor were
coordinated (I believe the cabinets themselves - the framework/casters
- were designed by the same group.) However Storage and the Alpha
group were in different parts of the company. We are now all part of
the SBU, so there may be more commonality. But maybe not, since the
design requirements for storage and CPU's are often different.
Up until StorageWorks, our storage products that rack mounted had one
very common feature - the air entered through the front and exited out
the back. The drives such as RL0x's, RA8x's, and RA60 were full width,
full depth and full height (10�"). Then we had the RA9x/SA7x
generation (� width, full depth, and full height) that also cooled front
to back. The DSSI equivalents - SF7x and SF3x - were also front to
rear, as were the Tx8x7 family of tape loaders.
Most standalone storage (I can't thick of an exception, but there is
probably one out there!) such as RM0x's, RP0x's, and HSCxx's were front
to rear.
[If you remember, most of the older products sat side by side. The air
had to go either front to back or bottom to top.]
But when we switched to the 3�" disk, all the form factors changed.
We could now fit drives into enclosures that were only half depth. To
maximize Megabyte per square foot (now Gigabyte/ft�) we installed
shelves front and rear. Since we didn't want preheated air in the
intake of the rear shelves, the air flow path was changed to front to
top and rear to top. (With the natural rising movement of hot air it
made sense to exhaust up. Also there is NOT enough room underneath the
SW800 to exhaust there - unless in a computer room with a raised floor.
The SW800 is not limited to that environment. The flushing fans add to
the natural convection.) Later with the introduction of 7200 RPM drives
we had to add the bottom fan tray to cool these "hotter" SBB's.
What I cannot answer is why the Alpha exhausts to the front. I'm sure
there were good reasons.
Hope that helps....
Bill
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