Two companies from the world of retail and food chilling and package plant rooms have targeted the data center space.

Both are winners of EMEA DatacenterDynamics Leaders Awards.

In briefings, both Munters, a Swedish engineering firm and its UK rival Excool make the standard arguments for indirect air cooling. Separate internal and external air flows mean fewer contaminants such as particulates, pollen, dust or smoke. Both also talk in terms of stainless steel construction and non-corrosive material components. And they also talk about huge operational savings compared with traditional mechanical cooling.

Munters has built a testing laboratory in its factory just outside the town of Spa in Belgium where its factory builds 1,200 to 1,600 units per year for various vertical markets. Many units are destined for the food industry.

The company identifies 20 data center facilities using its system, mainly in the US but also with deployments in Australia, Sweden and Japan. It says it has supplied 415 units and controls 85MW of mission critical cooling.The company uses Genesys software to design its three standard units delivering 100kW, 200kW or 300kW of cooling capacity.

Munters produces customized cooling units for the data center sector and claims an eight-week delivery turnaround from order through design submitted for customer approval to delivery.

The standard manufacturing process is mechanical steps one and two followed by , refrigeration, electrical and test. The heat exchangers inside the evaporative cooling unit are shipped from the US and the refrigeration units are made locally in Belgium.
 

Munters delivers what it describes as non-traditional evaporative cooling. The company’s test facility is a 1MW unit with a testing data center built adjacent to the factory. It has a raised-floor with a 24°C cold aisle and 36°C hot-aisle layout. It contains two rows, each 15 cabinets long. Inside the main building is the cooling test lab. During a visit in June inside the test lab chamber was a Munters Oasis 200 cooling unit.

The company says it built the testing lab at a cost of several hundred thousand euros as proof point for its units to deliver against customer requirements.

Excool
Over at Excool, Mark Collins, the company’s business development director, name-checks some of the same benefits for indirect air cooling in the data center as his Swedish rivals.

Its units are 450kW, 300kW, 200kW and 150kW.

Collins is unable to name check any data center customers that have deployed Excool solutions. (Its web site shows a deployment in Holland). It too has built an environmental test chamber for its products.

“We are engineering-led. We know we’re dealing with a highly sceptical and educated audience. We have more than 50 projects in design and as indirect air finds more acceptance we are finding more acceptance among the design engineers who are including our system in their designs.”

Compared with chilled water the calculations show never less than a 75% saving in capital outlay and operational cost, Collins says.

As for the direct or rather indirect competition, Collins says his system is lower-cost and more efficient.
 

A version of this article appears in FOCUS Issue 31. Look out for the digital edition available on September 5th.