Introduction

New PowerEdge Smart Flow chassis options increase airflow to support the highest core count CPUs and DDR5 in an air-cooled environment within current IT infrastructure. 

What is Smart Flow?

One way to increase the thermal capacity of an air-cooled server is to increase airflow that exhausts heat generated by components. Dell PowerEdge addresses this in several ways: high-performance fans, air baffles to direct airflow within the chassis, and intelligent thermal controls that monitor temperature sensors and dynamically adjust fan speeds. 

With Smart Flow, our thermal engineers have increased server thermal capacity by reducing impedance to fresh air intake on select server configurations. Servers with Smart Flow replace middle storage slots with centralized airflow inlets to maintain balanced airflow distribution within the server. This is made possible by new backplane configurations that allow larger air intake capacity. Smart Flow enables expanded CPU and memory configurations for lower storage needs in our next generation 1U and 2U air-cooled PowerEdge servers. Gains in thermal efficiency are also realized with Smart Flow implementations and will be explored in a subsequent paper. Examples for four different servers are shown here:

PowerEdge R660

Figure 1.    PowerEdge R660 airflow increase with Smart Flow

PowerEdge R760

Figure 2.    PowerEdge R760 airflow increase with Smart Flow

PowerEdge R6625

Figure 3.    PowerEdge R6625 airflow increase with Smart Flow

PowerEdge R7625

Figure 4.    PowerEdge R7625 airflow increase with Smart Flow

Conclusion

Dell PowerEdge Smart Flow increases select servers' thermal capacity, enabling high-power CPUs and GPUs, at increased ambient temperatures, for the most demanding workloads in air-cooled data centers.