Tips for Choosing Raised Flooring For Server Rooms

A server room requires you to effectively distribute power to data cables, racks and coolers (such as air, water and coolant). Therefore, a Server Room designer has to consider what’s the best way to distribute such services throughout the room whilst considering the best way to address potential future requirements? This would look at the increased demand for distributing data, technological advances in cooling, and growth.

In order to account for it all, a high-availability enterprise data center needs raised floors for their server room. Not only it’s highly practical, it suits other purposes too – in many cases, a company’s server room presentation is an important factor which may determine whether a customer will or not hire their service – a data center or server room that does not have raised floors will seem like something incomplete, or at the very least, less than state of the art. 

Raised flooring within your server room provides the following benefits:

• A great distribution system for conditioned cold air
• Power cabling conduits
• Data cabling tracks, supports and/or conduits
• A location to run either chilled water or other types of CRAC piping

Server Room Raised Floors

Needs for power and conditioned cold air distribution help making raised floors popular. Both server room design firms and operations individuals value the flexibility that such systems provide. Regarding power requirement, there are a lot more branch circuits per each square foot than there would be in the past. Usually, it’s much easier to install and maintain them under the floor than mounted on the ceiling. A recent trend is utilizing a data and power cable pathway as a part of the cabinet system. This reduces the quantity of cables under the room’s cable management access floor, making more room for air distribution. In general a raised server room floor is a dependable, practical design choice for the majority of facilities.

Selecting and evaluating server room raised floor solutions require that you consider a large quantity of variables. In order to make sure they’re easy to access, a raised floor solution needs easily removable panels, so that you can reach cooling, cables and power. Since today’s server room racks have been getting heavier by the year (increasing server processing in smaller footprints), a server room raised floor design needs stability and strength in a bolted stringer under-structure, instead of panels which self-lock to the corner pedestals.

Choosing the correct server room raised floor solution requires you to understand the structural needs for a rack that sits on the system, as well as understanding concentrated load ratings – the maximum load that can be applied to the tile’s weakest square inch without deforming it by more than a certain threshold. These are among the most important design considerations to take into account when preparing to deploy a raised floor system for a server room.