Specifications

Chapter 3. Introduction to IBM Flex System 59
3.5 Cooling
On the topic of Enterprise Chassis cooling, the flow of air in the Enterprise
Chassis follows a front to back cooling path, where cool air is drawn in at the front
of the chassis and warm air is exhausted to the rear. Air movement is controlled
by hot-swappable fan modules in the rear of the chassis and a series of internal
dampers.
The cooling is scaled up as required, based upon the number of nodes installed.
The number of cooling fan modules required for a number of nodes is described
in Table 3-3 on page 61.
Chassis cooling is adaptive and is node-based rather than chassis-based. Inputs
into the cooling algorithm are determined from:
򐂰 Node configurations
򐂰 Power monitor circuits
򐂰 Component temperatures
򐂰 Ambient temperature
With these inputs, each fan module has greater independent granularity in fan
speed control. This results in lower airflow volume (CFM) and lower cooling
energy spent at the chassis level for any configuration and workload.