This flat rack skid contains eight packaged chillers piped together creating a total combined a cooling capacity of more than 120 tons. It is designed for mobility and energy savings – two key features given the application, cloud computing data center cooling. The chillers on this skid are used to cool a remote data center. These remote data centers or cloud computing data centers are put to use where additional online capacity is necessary and permanent, on-site hardware is either too big an expense or only needed on an interim basis. For example, some of these cloud computing data centers are used at a customer’s location for short periods of time due to season demand increase or because of a companies expansion to a new location. The cloud computing data center offers flexibility in these circumstances, but cloud computing or permanent data centers need cooling.

Data Center Cooling Challenges

The tricky part of data center cooling is that the demand on the system is not constant – there can be significantly decreased activity in a data center for a company that is closed on the weekends for example. This is why General Air Products’ piped eight small air cooled chillers in parallel as opposed to providing our customer with one 120 ton chiller. The true cycling nature of our packaged chillers used in this modular approach provides the customer with unlimited load control over 0 to 100% loading. In the example where a company closes for the weekend, our modular approach will only consume the energy required to run three of the eight 16 ton chillers to keep the data center cool. Conversely, a single unit approach would have the one 120 ton chiller run every time the data center requires cooling. The energy savings is significant even over a short period of time.

Custom Cooling System Design

Cooling a cloud computing data center in this manner requires a highly custom design and build, best handled by the process cooling experts at General Air Products. Keep in mind though that for standard data center cooling needs we offer a much more standard type of product. Call or email us today to discuss your data center cooling needs – large or small, remote or in-house we can provide you with the expertise and cooling equipment that will meet your demand while providing you with as much energy savings as possible!