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DirectAire(TM) Multi-Zone Opposed Blade Damper From Tate(R) Wins SearchDataCenter.com 2011 Product of Year Gold Award

Damper Provides Better Airflow and Balancing to Diverse and Partially Loaded Racks

For the second year in a row, Tate®, a market leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of airflow management solutions for raised floor data centers, is the recipient of a SearchDataCenter.com 2011 Product of the Year gold award, which is the highest award available.

A panel of judges that included SearchDataCenter.com editors and other data center industry experts selected Tate's Multi-zone Opposed Blade Damper from among a number of products submitted in the infrastructure systems category. The panel judged the products on innovation, performance, ease of use and manageability, functionality, value and user feedback.

The Multi-zone Opposed Blade Damper, when installed beneath a DirectAire directional airflow grate, significantly reduces bypass air and enables the airflow delivery to be balanced based on the specific load in a 14U section of the rack. The damper allows data center operators to individually adjust airflow to three zones within the rack (top, middle and bottom) without removing the DirectAire panel, ensuring fast and accurate balancing to the fixed IT load.

When the Multi-zone Opposed Blade Damper is fully open, it restricts airflow by just 10 percent, which represents a dramatic airflow improvement over traditional manual slide dampers. The damper's drop-in design allows for easy installation by decoupling the damper from the panel. This means that standard, undampered directional airflow panels can be ordered as needed, with separate opposed blade dampers purchased so they can be added whenever and wherever necessary.

The Multi-zone Opposed Blade Damper can also be used when blanking panels cannot, to shut off or dampen airflow to different sections of the rack where large portions are left empty. This is especially important in data centers where co-location operators are unable to install blanking panels in their customers' racks, or IT managers are unable to keep blanking panels installed in their own racks. Zoned dampening can allow IT managers to optimize the airflow quantity far more accurately.

Another advantage to the data center operator is an increase in potential available critical power. The reduction in airflow volume as a result of using DirectAire's directional airflow and closing off airflow to unused sections of racks reduces the energy usage for cooling at the CRAC unit level. This can enable increased efficiency of the data center proportional to the deployment of the technology.

The 2011 Product of the Year awards represent the sixth year that SearchDataCenter.com has judged data center products. In 2010, Tate's SmartAire™ variable-air-volume (VAV) damper was also honored with a gold award in the infrastructure category. In addition to infrastructure, product categories included systems management software and computing hardware.

For more information about Tate's in-floor cooling devices and a white paper on data center cooling, please visit www.tateinc.com/infloor. For information about other Tate products and services, please visit www.tateinc.com or call (410) 799-4200.

ABOUT TATE®
Tate is a leading manufacturer of raised access floors and in-floor cooling systems for data centers. Tate offers innovative solutions to effectively manage the diverse, variable, and high density heat loads commonly found in data centers. In-floor cooling systems such as SmartAire™, DirectAire™ and PowerAire™ help reduce PUE and create an energy efficient data center. As the market leader, Tate supplies best-in-class raised access floors that provide flexibility to meet any service distribution requirement.

Related Links:

Tate
http://www.tateinc.com

DirectAire™
http://tateinc.com/products/directaire.aspx

Multi-zone Opposed Blade Damper
http://www.tateinc.com/products/multi_zone_opposed_blade.aspx

data center
http://tateinc.com/products/data_centers.aspx

SmartAire™
http://tateinc.com/products/smartaire.aspx