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OCTOBER 2015 | 57 Raised Access Floors The product comes in 21 finishes and three gloss levels: polished, matte and brushed. Want long-term beauty? Tecnika panels can be refinished. Haworth has also invested in its manufacturing processes to make products that are environmentally friendly. TecCrete panels are made with 50 per cent recycled content. TecCrete and Tecnika meet Greenguard's Gold standard, which means the products emit very few volatile organic compounds (VOCs). One of the touted benefits of raised access floors is easier management of the data and power cables that snake through your average workplace. One cable management provider, FreeAxez, says it has a new cable management system that eliminates traditional wiring worries. In the past, FreeAxez says, cable management was more like cable hiding, a matter of concealing wires in walls, in concrete floor trenches and in power poles. Many of those traditional systems share the same drawbacks: they make it hard to relocate the wires when an occupant wants to change the configuration of the space; and the more difficult the cable relocation job, the more it costs. As a solution, FreeAxez offers Gridd, an adaptive cabling distribution system that safely distributes cables throughout a building directly beneath the finished floor. The Gridd system can be repositioned, redeployed, reused or recycled in its original state, in any building. "Whole-building cabling distribution systems are the future of commercial and high-tech environments," said Earl Geertgens, CEO of FreeAxez. "Gridd is a catalyst for adaptive and collaborative space as it allows for commercial layouts to be recon- figured easily, quickly, and at a significant cost savings to traditional raised flooring systems and other wiring methods." The Gridd system can be found in locations that range from intimate sound studios to office buildings and universities. It has been installed in multiple proj- ects throughout Canada including in buildings for Rogers Communications, York Regional Police and the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. While plenty of raised access floor innovation targets the commercial office market, a number of changes speak to data center operators. Tate, for instance, has upgraded its SmartAire automatic variable-air volume damper for data cen- ters, making the product easier to use and more flexible. The new SmartAire MZ offers a simplified user interface, plus four independent control zones. The damper monitors inlet air temperature to ensure the right amount of air is delivered to the computer equipment installed in the racks throughout the facility. With its new flexibility, SmartAire MZ adjusts cooling for each of the four zones on each rack to account for variable loads. This granularity means no overcooling where computer equipment doesn't generate as much heat as other areas – which, in turn, means less wasted energy. The SmartAire also automatically rebalances the airflow when equipment is refreshed with newer technology that may have a differ- ent heat load profile. This latest SmartAire also comes with connectors for a range of building automation systems for easier temperature control and monitoring, and access to information that a data center operator can use to help decide where to install new computer equipment for energy efficiency. Tate also developed a system to isolate air conditioning for technology equip- ment, to make cooling data centers more efficient yet comfortable for the people who work in these facilities. Recently, ASHRAE expanded the allowable air inlet temperature and humid limits for cooling servers. Now a data center could theo- retically cool its equipment with inlet air above the historical 27-degree Celsius threshold, however, this creates a human problem as many servers have tempera- ture increases as high as 15 to 20-degree Celsius from inlet to exhaust. Tate intro- duced the new fully contained IsoFlo cabinet as a way to balance the needs of staff and maximize efficiency. The IsoFlo cabinet isolates air conditioning to cool the equipment, and the hot exhaust air being released from the equipment. This allows the occupied areas of the data center to stay comfortably cool for workers. IsoFlo also makes it easier to cool computers situated in non-uniform rack layouts, which are common in multi-tenant and multi-user data center facilities. By isolating the supply and return airflow, the cabinet eliminates the need to face all of the cabinets in the same direction, with cold-air intakes in one direction and hot- air exhausts in the other. Tate says that all in all, it's less expensive to build data centers with IsoFlo cabinets than build with full-scale hot- aisle/cold-aisle containment systems. While raised access floors got their start in the data center market, it's clear that this concept of a strong yet modular walking sur- face has sprinted to the fore in the commercial office realm. A IsoFlo cabinet from Tate Access Floors Inc.

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