Gartner Glossary

In-row Cooling

With the advent of high-density servers, infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders are challenged to provide adequate cooling for computer rooms. In-row solutions provide highly focused cooling by placing multiple cooling units directly in a row of server racks or above the cold aisles (by having more than one per row, you gain redundancy and better placement of cold air to the heat source). These in-row systems may be used to augment the room cooling, or it may be a closed-loop system, built in a special cold-aisle enclosure for the racks that doesn’t depend on room cooling. These systems can require chilled water or refrigerant to be piped directly to the rows of servers where the cooling units are placed.