A Novel Airflow Management System With Redundant Fan Field Replaceable Units

A novel airflow architecture for a networking chassis will be described in this work. This chassis is a pull system with two sets of four fans located in series at its exhaust. Each set of four fans is a field replaceable unit (FRU). The unique feature of this chassis is that one set of fans, called the rear fan FRU, is replaceable from the rear side of the chassis and the other set of fans, called the front fan FRU, is replaceable from the front side of the chassis. Computational fluid dynamics simulations and measurement data show this chassis is capable of providing up to 78% – 79% of its maximum cooling capacity when one fan FRU is removed from the chassis, and up to 62% – 67% of its maximum cooling capacity when one fan FRU has failed.