For decades, the common wisdom has been that data center owners needed to use raised floor environments to enable more efficient cooling of technology. However, colocation and hyperscale providers have been able to experience the reality of deploying data centers with simple slab, or non-raised floors, thanks to their use of different indoor chilled-water cooling solutions. The debate between whether to build a raised floor data center or one with slab floors is not an either-or decision, but one that requires careful consideration of business goals and technical objectives as described in this paper.
