Here are four reasons you’ll love Raised Access Floors:
Cooling
Since maintaining a highly optimized temperature is critical, raised access floors provide unique cooling capabilities. Basically, raised access floor can act as a plenum for cool, conditioned air to distribute uniformly beneath the equipment center. They reduce contact between the floor and the concrete foundation, and allow conditioned air to be dispersed upward more effectively and accurately through carefully-spaced diffuser tiles and ducts. Cool air can also be harnessed from chilled pipes running beneath the floor.
Fire Suppression
Let’s face it-what’s inside your data center is precious and often mission-critical, and you can’t just rely on smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and sprinkler heads to protect it. Unfortunately, since data centers require such an enormous amount of power to run continually, and since the centers maintain such a high density of cables and circuits, fire-risk will almost invariably be high.
Raised access floors help suppress fire risk in two primary ways:
- The flooring is noncombustible, providing an excellent fire barrier between the equipment up top and the cables below. Automatic fire shutoffs can be installed underneath to keep fires from spreading.
- The floors provide exceptional copper grid grounding capabilities and electrical continuity.
Flexibility
Since most raised access floors are built with a series of lightweight and interchangeable tiles, the design provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and adaptability. In data centers, where equipment is frequently added and updated, this flexibility makes it easy to improve, modify and adapt data center design without a major disruption to operations. Wire management and repairs can be done without ladders.
Professionalism
Raised access floors are modern, sleek, and clean-providing ample space for sub-floor power cabling-which is especially important for facility tours with important clients and customers. In other words, instead of a mass of tangled cords and power lines, your data center will look efficient and professional.