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The objective of this work is to introduce and evaluate a new end-of-aisle cooling design which consists of three cooling configurations. The key objectives of close-coupled cooling are to enable controlled cooling of information technology (IT) equipment, flexible and modular design, and the containment of hot air exhaust from the cold air. The thermal performance of the proposed solution is evaluated using computational fluid dynamics modeling. A computational model of a small size data center room has been developed. The room is modeled to be a hot aisle containment setup, i.e., the hot air exhaust exiting for each row is contained and directed within a specific volume. The cold aisle is separated from the hot aisle by means of banks of heat exchangers (HXs) placed on either side of the containment aisle. Based on the placement of rack fans, the design is divided into three sub-designs—Case 1: passive HXs with rack fan walls; Case 2: active HXs (coupled with fans) with rack fan walls; Case 3: active HXs (coupled with fans) with no rack fans. The cooling performance is calculated based on the thermal and flow parameters obtained for all three configurations. The computational data obtained has shown that the Case 1 is used only for lower system resistance IT. However, Cases 2 and 3 can handle denser IT systems. Case 3 is the design that can consume lower fan energy and handle denser IT systems. The article also discusses the cooling behavior of each type of design under cooling failure conditions with Case 2 showing better cooling redundancy compared with other two cases.