Data Center Cooling - 101

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. This is Sam Morrow, and Rob Hudiman is going to continue the training that we've got going on today as Data Center Cooling 101 as we start the path of cooling. So excited to hear what Rob has to say. And, Rob, I'll turn it over to you, and you can get started. [00:00:17] Speaker 2: All right. Thank you, Sam. So, good afternoon, I guess, everybody again, for those who are on. This presentation is on Data Center Cooling, and we're going to focus on just kind of the making of the cold air in the Data Center. We're not going to focus too, too much today on any of the optimization or airflow kind of solutions that we have other than those that make cold air. That's going to be a whole another presentation. So, like I've been doing on the previous presentations, you know, I put a little box around what we're going to be talking about when you're looking at our line card. So, it's really about air conditioning in the Data Center and just kind of how that works, the terminology. A lot about what you hear on tours that you may not kind of know what's being said, but you just kind of nod to go along. Hopefully, you gain some confidence and understand what some of this terminology refers to and that makes you more effective in the field. So, we're going to cover, you know, four or five key bullet points. We're going to talk about some terms that you hear around Data Center Cooling and some of the metrics involved. I'm going to give you a quick kind of pie chart on, you know, where energy is consumed in the Data Center. So, you can see the impact the cooling infrastructure does from a consumption standpoint, give a couple examples of how we use metrics, both here at CEG when the engineers are in the field, some things that you can certainly take away from this to make you more effective out there as well. and more valuable to your clients. I'll show you an example of how it's used by us in another way within the optimization scheme. So, we'll talk about how we use metrics. And then, I'm just going to go through what some of these things look like, what some of these air conditioners look like, the different types, how they're used, what the applications are. And we'll end it all with some trends in the industry and maybe some... And some qualifying questions around cooling. Again, not too much on this presentation about optimization and all of like containment and blanking panels and all those things. So, that will be on the air flow optimization training. So, boys and girls, today we're going to have vocab and math to start us off. These terminology on the right and some metrics on the left, it looks like a very busy slide. But I'll tell you what. When I first got this years ago, I used this exact slide in a training I did for my previous employer when I was training sales reps. And it hit this and the subsequent slide really kind of hit home with them. Because there's a lot of confusing terminology out there, especially on the power and the cooling side. And as you recall, when we had power discussions, we talked about a lot of things that related to watts and kilowatts as a metric that had to do primarily with power. And to this day, although it's changing pretty quickly, people always... ...or historically and to this day have referred to cooling and their capacities in this word "tons" here you see in the bottom left corner of this triangle. And how do you correlate the two? How do you...you know, what is a ton of cooling? What does that mean to me? And how does that relate to how much I need for my load in my racks and things of that nature? What's really nice in the industry today is there are conversion factors that actually can turn some of these cooling, historical cooling terminology metrics all into a common metric, which is watts or kilowatts. So this is...I think you're going to find that this is a pretty helpful slide for you all. But on the right side, the definition, you know, a ton of cooling cooling, you know, I would be safe to say that a fair amount of us don't know what that means. But it's just interesting. It's the energy required to change a ton of water. So 2,000 pounds of water, you know, at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which is freezing, to turn that water into ice. That's the amount of energy that's required. That's a ton of cooling. And I always kind of, you know, that's a little side nugget. Now you know. But look back at the triangle here. What's most important is, I feel, which I use a lot, this and the inverse, is taking tons to kilowatts is a multiplication of 3.516. So I always kidded our sales reps in my previous company that you need to memorize your 3.5 times tables because when you get into a data center and someone says I have a 30 ton air conditioning unit, you can quickly, you know, do 30 times 3.5 and figure out kind of how many kilowatts of cooling that air conditioner is rated for. And then things start to make sense when they talk about how much IT load they have in the space. And we'll talk about that more on a couple slides down from us. So that metric in itself, you'll see air conditioners also rated in kilobtus. So a British thermal unit, this is the heat load. And a lot of air conditioning units are rated by the amount of heat load that they can cool. And there's also a conversion to take BTUs back to kilowatts as well. So I like this kind of triangle chart with the conversions. And then I just kind of wrote in there, you know, that a ton of cooling is 12,000 BTUs per hour. And a ton of cooling is also the inverse there is, you know, 3.516 kilowatts. So a lot of the metric associated with airflow, the speed air moves is called a CFM, a cubic feet per minute. So one ton of cooling also equals 400 cubic feet per minute of flow. And you'll see a lot of fan speeds and perforated floor tiles and things of that nature get rated in the amount of CFM they can accommodate or provide. So there's a metric there to kind of correlate tons to CFM. This slide's some of the same information, just looking at it a little bit differently. You'll see the tons and kilowatts, the metric I just showed you, and then the inverse of it. So you can take a kilowatt, one kilowatt is 0.2843 tons, or one ton is 3.516 kilowatts. So those are important metrics. I would suggest that, you know, that type of those two things should be something that you familiarize yourself with and kind of here's why. Actually, here's why is on the next slide. This slide just shows the overall kind of how power consumption in the data center, 100% of the power, where it's being applied. So you can see that in today's world, the IT equipment, the compute power, all of that stuff that's in our racks that the infrastructure's providing power and cooling for consumes about 52% of the overall energy in a data center. And then the support system is the other 48%, your cooling, your UPS, lighting, et cetera. But look how much of energy consumption the cooling infrastructure takes of the whole, 38%. Some people say it's closer to 40%, I guess 38% is kind of close to 40%, but so that's a huge chunk. If you take these granular slices on the right, it represents the largest chunk of energy consumption in a data center is the power it takes to run the cooling infrastructure. So there's a lot of inefficiency going on with the cooling in a data center, especially legacy data centers, and there's where the low-hanging fruit is. And that's why we have airflow optimization products as kind of a foundational offering in our portfolio. So here's why that metric is important. So when you go into a data center, and if you're kind of consultatively navigating and you need to ask some questions, if you're with facilities guys especially, I mean, you just simply ask them kind of what's your IT load? So they may take you over to a screen or to the actual UPS and use the user interface and just say, well, I got a 600 kVA UPS and, you know, I'm 90%, 80% loaded. And, you know, so it'll show the output, right? It'll say I've got X amount of kilowatts of load on my UPS. And then you look in the data center and he's got eight big perimeter air conditioning units. And he says they're all 30-ton units. So you do eight times 30 and that's 240. You can use this metric, either the tons to kilowatts or kilowatts to tons, and just correlate it really quickly. And I guarantee you nine times out of 10, you're going to say, man, this guy's got way more cooling than he has load that he needs to cool. I wonder why he needs that much. Now, there's a couple kind of be carefuls with that that I've kind of noted down below. It is a best practice in data centers to have some redundancy on your cooling. So to have certainly more available than what you need to cool it, some people call it like standby or hot standby, that you can switch to the redundant air conditioning unit. And then there are some physical limitations in some of these sites with the geometry of the room or the depth of the raised floor, the height of the ceiling. And that just may prevent the air conditioning units from being as effective as they can and they need to overcompensate. So there's about a 20% fudge factor in some of that. But generally, if you can look at the highest level, ask them how much IT load they have in kilowatts, they'll tell you. Or they'll go look for you and tell you. And you can add up or ask them how many air conditioning units. They can point to them. They can tell you how many tons. And then you can use, you know, this metric, the 0.28, where you can go back to, you know, one of these. If you say there's 240 tons times 3.5, you can kind of do some quick math and just say, huh, you know what? It's a lot more than the load that he says he's got on his UPS. I wonder what's going on there. And this is not new information, but generally data centers have far in excess cooling capacity than the load they need to cool to the tune of maybe up to like three times as much. So therein lies an opportunity for us to work with the client about maybe doing some efficiency studies or taking a more closer look as to why they feel they need that much cooling, how it's being applied. And that's kind of where it ties into our assessments, our CFD modeling, our airflow efficiency products, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the first kind of real piece of why those metrics are important and kind of how we use it. This slide is an example of how metrics are also used. And it's with what's referred to as bypass airflow. In layman's terms, that's leakage. That's airflow that's going somewhere where it shouldn't and causing an inefficiency. So a bypass airflow could be where you don't have blanking panels in a cabinet and cold air just moves straight from the front of the rack to the back of the rack and mixes with the hot air in the back and doesn't cool any of the gear. It can also be a floor cutout that's got a lot of cabling from underneath a raised floor coming up into the cabinets, whether it be power or data cables. So the bullet points here in blue are industry metrics. It's not something I put in there and calculated out or did a lot of research. So there's certainly the ability to poke some holes in this. But for this sake and for this presentation, let's just trust that that's accurate. So they're saying the industry says that for one cubic foot a minute. So that's the amount of volume of airflow. At 20 degrees, at delta T, that's the difference in temperature of what you're feeding the equipment versus the hot air that's coming out. That equates to 21.6 BTUs per hour. And they're also saying that in a floor cutout, that's eight by six, which is generally the size that we drop a brush grommet in. And that's why we use brush grommets is to plug these holes up, that if the hole's only 50% full of cables, that that thing's going to leak 92 CFM. So if you take those two as givens and you use some of those metrics, there's another common number that we use a lot, this 8760. That's 24 hours a day times 365 days a year. So when you do the math and you say, hey, you know, you're at 10 cents per kilowatt hour. You're paying for your electricity. You can come away with saying that eight by six cutout that's only 50% full of cables is costing you $5.55 in efficiency. And if you multiply that out for the annual year, that's 510 bucks just for the one cutout. Okay? So if you've got 100 of those things, now this number becomes very meaningful. And that's used sometimes if people are real interested in the return on investment of deploying a mass quantity of floor grommets. They want to know like kind of how am I going to, where's the savings going to be realized because I can't touch it or feel it. You're going to see it on your electric bill. And here's the math. This is just another example of where metrics are used in the industry. Again, just kind of just food for thought on that. Moving on to now some of the types of cooling that are in data centers today. There's really two different kind of methodologies for cooling systems and air conditioning design. One is called a chilled water system or a CRAW unit, which is a computer room air handler. And the other is this direct expansion or DX system. And you'll hear people say I have DX crack units. So a crack unit is computer room air conditioner. Some people will use the word crack and it'll be synonymous with both because that's just how they talk. But you can ask the question, is it all chilled water or is it refrigerant based? So a chilled water system is pretty simple in its design. I mean, the unit that sits on the floor is a big coil with fans that are pulling the air through the coil. And what's going through the coil is cold water. Hot water or warmer water comes out of the unit, goes back into a chiller and gets vented out through a cooling tower. That's a real simple process. It does bring water into the data center. There will be chilled water pipes associated with every single one of these units, no matter what the manufacturer is. On the DX system, now we're refrigerant based. So you're introducing compressors instead of just fan motors. So the compressors in addition to the fans, the compressors, this is like how our homes run, right? We've got a unit. It pressurizes the refrigerant in the lines. And then it expands that medium, that refrigerant in the loop. And then there's kind of rooftop heat rejection fan units that sit there and take away the hot air. So the refrigerant lines that are brought to and from these AC units that you see on the floor as compared to water. So these are the two kind of -- and this is really all there is. There's some hybrid systems out there. There's some really unique things that some of the manufacturers are trying to do with cooling efficiency. Because they too realize that they are the -- probably some of the largest culprits of the inefficiency over a period of time. And it's, you know, they're responsible for turning some of this stuff around. So there are some unique kind of hybrid models out there. I know Emerson's got this product called DSE that is a hybrid between the two. And then there is a concept called free cooling or economization, where you're taking advantage of seasonalities in the cold air in the wintertime, et cetera. But both of these things kind of look the same when they're sitting on the raised floor or in the -- on a slob floor. It doesn't matter until you start kind of asking questions or you look, you know, if you're -- if it's an engineer and you're under the floor, you can see the chilled water lines versus refrigerant lines. But this is the two main things that you're going to see. Chilled water, CRAW units, direct expansion or DX as CRACK units. The two main providers, vendor partners we have for these units are APC Schneider and Vertiv. And Vertiv kind of historically, that is the Liebert brand. And they are by far the dominant provider of cooling in data centers. The other two kind of leading manufacturers beyond these two that you'll see out there is a company called Data Air and a company called Stoltz Engineering. There are some one-off companies that do some unique, highly customized units for different applications. But the general population in data centers today, you'll find either the Liebert/Vertiv brand, APC, Stoltz, or Data Air. So what do these things kind of look like? Right? So you've got a variety of shapes and sizes. And I'm going to go through a number of them with you now. So Schneider's got this line called Uniflare, and this is their chilled water design. Liebert's got their chilled water design. It's called their DS unit. And then they've got the smaller, which can be a hybrid unit, which is a pretty nice newer unit, this PCW or PDX. So it's their P series. And they can be a chilled water unit or a DX unit. You can order it either way. So let's talk about these, what downflow and upflow mean. But these units are all designed to be mounted on a floor, either a slab or a pressurized raised floor. So with regard to a downflow unit, what you see here on the right is an example of a Liebert brand. This would be a, just kind of looking at it as a 30 ton DS unit. I can tell because it's got this extra width to it. This unit's physically, it's about 120 inches wide, maybe three feet deep and about six feet high. That's how physically large these are. The coil, just like a coil on top of your heater in your house, you know, it's a V-shaped coil. It sits in this box and you've got these large fans down underneath the unit that actually pull the air. So the hot air, the return air comes directly into the top of the unit. The unit's open on the top. And if you looked in there, you'd see layers sometimes of thick filters. So any of us that have like a gas-fired heater in our house, you know you've got to change filters. Same thing here. So the speed at which the volume of air that's coming out of the bottom of these things is pretty darn close to the quantity of air and the speed that's going into the top. You just don't see it, right? And you really don't feel it. If you ever got to the top of one of these units, you can feel the mass amount of air being pulled into it. But these things are used in a pressurized raised floor where you've got a variety of different style perforated tiles. And that's where the pressure is released. So a perforated tile is an important component to an overall cooling infrastructure. And perf tiles are typically rated in the amount of CFM that can run through them. I just put two down here that are kind of common in the industry. These are both made by a company called Tate. The one on the left is a 56% grate. The one on the right is called their direct air. And these are more fins that are angled. So you can place this tile and direct the airflow directly at the equipment to be cooled like a cabinet versus having it blow straight up in the air. So a downflow unit can also be used on a slab floor like a UPS or a mechanical room. Sometimes they'll blow straight out the bottom like you see on here. So these stands, the unit, you may be able to see all of this. And this would be up against a wall. The air will be blowing out to cool a UPS room. Or the top of the stand would be the top of the raised floor here. So a pressurized raised floor would actually line up with the bottom of the unit so you wouldn't see the stand or the three big fan motors down there. One of the newer style and advancements that the manufacturers have made in fan design for air conditioners for energy efficiency is a term called EC plug fan. So the letters EC and plug fan. So that's an electrically commutated motor. So that is an energy efficient motor design. And then these fans, instead of being like a squirrel cage like you have in our houses that blow the heat up through our ducts, these things look more like airfoils like in jet engines. And again, that's a lot less energy to run them and they're a lot more efficient with the way they're used. So whenever you see a spec for an air conditioner or hear someone talk about, you know, it uses EC plug fans, you kind of know now what they're referring to. It's an energy efficient kind of motor and fan blade design. Upflow units, the opposite. Air is coming out of the top. These things are a pain in the butt when we see them in data centers because, as you can see, the air comes out the top of this unit and the return air comes in the bottom. So one of the big things, no-no's about, you know, efficiencies in the data center on air flow side is, you know, the mixing of the cold supply air and the hot return air and separating those two with different types of containment is a real benefit. It's hard to separate hot and cold air when they're both kind of on the face of the unit and it's almost mixing right out of the chute. So it's a little bit more challenging. Upflow units would be used for, they may duct the output of these things so you wouldn't see like these louvered panels, but you may see big ducts coming out because if you have a pressurized, I mean, excuse me, a slab floor design. So all the equipment, the racks are on a kind of a concrete slab or they're on a raised floor that's not pressurized, you will have a lot of times overhead ducting. So they'll, the output of these units will actually be into duct work that gets, you know, routed out to the, and drop down through grills into the spaces it needs to cool. I'm going to talk a little bit more about this PDX and PCW unit you see here that I showed earlier because it is kind of versatile and there's some different applications. So one of the, one of the key kind of design criteria, best practices for cooling is to provide as much of a direct path for the return air, the red, the hot air to get back to the unit. So if you're in a hot aisle, cold aisle kind of designed or you're starting from scratch, you want to make sure that you're putting and orientating the, the air conditioning unit kind of at the hot aisle so things can easily get back on the return path. And that's what you see on the left. If you don't have a raised floor, there's two kinds of ways to use this as a downflow unit. You know, the best practice is the one at the top where you're taking advantage of the plenum above your ceiling as the return path for the hot exhaust air. So then you have a vent in the ceiling and you're using the fan motors in the air conditioning unit itself to actually draw and pull that hot air back while the cold air is being pumped out of the bottom and drawn into the, into the server cabinets. If that's not the case, then you've got a little bit more of an inefficient design, which is this kind of bottom middle where you're still pulling it in from the top and you're just hoping it makes its way back there. But inefficiencies happening in between, they just don't show it in that diagram. And again, this unit can be placed into a corner like you see in the right, you know, as an upflow unit and direct its cold air out of two of the sides. So that's kind of a unique application. So that unit from a Vertiv is a pretty versatile unit. And then, you know, I failed to mention, but I think it's pretty obvious that the, these units, everything we're talking about has their individual ratings as to how many tons or how many kilowatts of cooling that they are able to provide. So you obviously need to match the right type of air conditioning unit with the type of load or the quantity, you know, how many kilowatts of load that you're trying to cool. Some of the more frequently used products, it's a faster growing piece of the market. I know we quote more of these really than kind of any other type of cooling that we get involved with are floor mount kind of row based units that are referred to more commonly as in row units. And both Vertiv and APC have an offering in this and they both offer kind of similar form factors or footprints. They got a, a skinny kind of 12 inch or 300 millimeter wide unit. And then they have a, something that looks more like a cabinet and that's by design. This is almost a lineup and match at a 24 inch wide footprint. That's about 42 inches deep and maybe about 80 inches high. So they have a wider, they have a skinny model and a wide model. These are designed to sit on the floor. They have both refrigerant based and chilled water versions of these. I think the Vertiv lineup is a little bit more, there's more items to choose from than the APC, but they're similar in design that they're pulling hot air in from the rear of the unit and blowing cold air straight out the front. And where these are, are most commonly used are in modular or pod type designs, especially when they're incorporating cold aisle containment. Now, when you're doing design, you can put the air conditioning units right in line with the cabinets. And that the key thing there and why these things are, are, are, are, are as popular as they are and why people try to incorporate them into designs is that first bullet point. That by far is something that ought to be desired in almost any type of design is to get the cooling source as close to the load. that's going to be needing it as possible. Because otherwise in a big data center room with a lot of perimeter units, without a lot of, when they're just kind of always on and, you know, operating kind of as their own entities, you're really cooling that entire room to the hottest spot. You want to get your hottest spot problematic area, so you're over cooling a lot of other areas that don't necessarily need to be over cooled, but you need to do it. It's again, it's that analogy of, you know, you want to keep your house at 68 degrees in the summertime with all your windows open, you're going to crank your air conditioner to do that. And that's an inefficient, an inefficiency. They are generally easy to install, you know, they're delivered, they come off a truck, there's not any like rigging that's required to get these in or assembly necessarily once they arrive on site. And they do have some flexible applications, and again, most commonly used in some contained environments. And I've got a picture there of an APC kind of cold aisle containment design. We've been quoting them more on like an individual or one or two unit basis. Anthony's been doing a lot of calls with Mike Barbaric and going into a lot of data centers that are smaller in size that have now, you know, upgraded their equipment and they're generating a lot more heat. So their current cooling isn't able to either handle the critical load, there's no failover for redundancy, or there's no area for scalability. So these units are nice and their footprints generally small, and they can be placed in these rooms to add on to or provide redundant cooling capabilities. The other thing that's nice about these in some of the smaller computer room designs is if they have a small chilled water unit that's really maxed out, we can propose a refrigerant-based in-row unit. And now, if they have an issue with making the chilled water, they won't take down both units. They've got not only do they have redundancy for the capacity, they've got redundancy in the medium that they're using for the cooling. So the DX unit will run if the chilled water needs to be maintained and vice versa. So getting smaller as we go. So these are more Liebert brand, Vertiv brand units. So if we're talking about closets or small control rooms, they've got some small systems, and I'm showing three of them here. This one in the bottom left is what they call a mini split system. These are the things you might see hanging up on a wall about six feet in the air. So this thing can be one and a half tons roughly for this mini split system. They've got a product called Minimate that sits in a ceiling and is mounted in a ceiling that can get up to the eight-ton range. And then they've got this thing that can go on, like usually it's like what you see in a lot of hotel rooms almost. It's called the Datamate, and it's also a wall mount. It's usually more lower on the wall that it's mounted. But again, so if there's opportunities for cooling in small spaces, MDFs, IDFs, however you want to say it, the network closets on a campus, those, you know, and you'll see this on a subsequent slide when we talk about trends. We're going to get more and more opportunities, I think, in the way we're selling to outfit some of these smaller spaces. And this, the portfolio that we have from Schneider and Vertiv will allow us to properly accommodate almost all of those opportunities. Kind of two more I just want to share with you that are, you don't see these too much out there. These are rack top units or a ceiling mount unit from Vertiv. It's called an XDV or an XDO. These are usually used to supplement perimeter cooling. The one on the left, the XDV, is actually mounted to the top of a cabinet, and it draws hot air from inside the cabinet or from the hot aisle. And then it's got kind of trapezoid shaped and those fans pump cold air down off the top of a rack. The XDO is actually designed to sit in the ceiling mount in between the aisles. You know, I've got a customer that uses our cabinets as their standard deployment, and they do just exactly what I said. They've got a pressurized raised floor. You can see those Tate 56% grates here down at the bottom. And you can see the XDV units mounted on the top of our cabinets. These are all refrigerant-based units. So with refrigerant comes a pumping station. So you've got these things that look like cabinets with a lot of, you know, funky-looking lines and connections that run out to these XDV units that are on tops of the cabinets. But, you know, this is a customer of ours that has, you know, a hundred of these things in their data center now. You can kind of see in the left on this picture on the right that this is one big row. This is a column. There's like the fire alarm panel. And you can see a row of our racks and all the XDVs lined up on top of it. The last thing I want to talk about is, you know, this is a little bit of a newer technology. I don't know, you know, there's very few opportunities. We should probably start thinking about talking about using stuff like this a little bit more. But there's pros and cons. But I wanted to just make you aware. So there's what's called a rear door heat exchanger. So this door actually gets mounted onto a cabinet. This is the Liebert offering. There's other manufacturers of this type of technology. One we're talking early on called Motivare. But it's actually a heat exchanger. The server motors themselves blow the hot air out. And this thing actually has coils in it that remove the heat right at the rack and don't put it out into the room. And it provides up to 35 kilowatts of cooling. It's not making cold air. It's getting rid of the heat. And that right there is, you know, oftentimes overlooked. Because in reality in a data center with air flow and efficiency, it's all about getting rid of the heat. And not as much about making the cold air. And it's the heat that mixes with the cold is where the inefficiencies are generated and where the root causes are associated with. So getting rid of heat is a really big deal. And this is just another way of doing it with a heat exchanger built into the rear door of a cabinet. [00:40:24] Speaker 3: Hey, Rob, quick question on that, if you don't mind backing up. You know, outside of bringing, you know, chilled water into a data center and some IT folks frown from that. I would think, is this a more cost efficiency approach than having to do all the duct work and having the, you know, you're still going to have the exchanges on the ceiling, right? So is this going to cost more to get rid of the heat air than compared to some of the mechanical approaches? [00:40:55] Speaker 2: If you're lining up a bunch of racks, it could very well be more expensive. I mean, there's pros and cons to all of the things that I've showed you. Some of the rear door heat exchangers do require a unique kind of manifold system to move some of the, either the refrigerant through the lines and handle that. And those manifold systems can be installed for low density areas, either in the rack or a lot of times it's under a raised floor. So there's, it's, you really need to look at total cost for ownership and not just the cost of the rear door. Something we can go into more if you're interested. I can get information and maybe some modeling on some different applications for you. The last piece we didn't really talk about yet, but kind of goes hand in hand. This has really nothing to do with the making of cold air, but it's certainly how the cold air is managed in these units. And it's the importance of using monitoring and controls. For the longest time, air conditioning units were acting as single entities. They're, they're on 100% of the time. Depending on how their settings are set up and where they're located and how they're utilized in the data center. Meaning how well the data center is balanced and they're sharing the load. Some of them may be heating. You know, if these things have humidification capabilities into it, they provide humidification by boiling water inside the unit. So there's a lot of energy consumed to make humidification. Some of them may be in a heating cycle. Some of them may be in a cooling cycle. Some of them may be humidifying. Some of them may be dehumidifying. You could have a lot of this stuff going on at the same time for units that are right next to one another. Because they all know what the guy next to them is doing. So there are kind of elaborate kind of control methodologies out there that incorporate monitor, temperature monitoring for feedback. And one of the most advanced designs out there is a system called ICOM from Emerson. And you're looking at an ICOM control panel. And they actually have now -- you can link these units together. What they talk about here in this bullet M-to-M machine-to-machine communication. So they know what the units next to them and adjacent to them are doing and kind of how the load's being shared. And you can program these things. You can kind of turn one off and put it into that standby mode like I described earlier for redundancy. And you can make your -- you can almost dial in your data center to make it a lot more efficient by using an effective controls methodology. And a lot of -- at least the legacy Emerson brand going back maybe five to ten years can actually -- they have upgrade kits to put these ICOM controls into. And again, we don't probably talk about that enough. But it's certainly something with our type of program we have with Vertiv that we have the ability to sell these ICOM upgrades. So kind of more on that at a later time. The other thing I wanted to touch on down here was this fan speed coordination. So I'm sure a lot of you have heard about a term called a VFD, but maybe don't know exactly what that means when you hear your customer saying, yeah, I've got VFDs on all my crack units. And you nod and go, yep, I hear that makes it more efficient. So a VFD stands for a variable speed drive. And it's a motor controller that actually takes that motor from running full speed 100% of the time all the time. And you can vary the speed of the motor -- of the fan motor -- by varying the frequency and voltage supplied to it. So you can set these fan motors to run at specific speeds. Or as you can see here at the bottom, they can be tweaked for precision. And what a lot of companies will do now that employ these VFDs in conjunction with their air conditioning fans is they'll have feedback loops from temperature sensors that are out in the data center. So like, you know, Mario's got a big client in Virginia that he has a huge monitoring system installed there. And they actually take that data, that temperature data, and use it. They have algorithms that actually can vary -- have these VFDs either create more cooling or more CFM in given areas when the load changes or the demand increases. And so they're running as efficiently as possible at all given times instead of being 100% on all the time. So a VFD is something that usually these units can be upgraded to. Some older DX units, it's very difficult or maybe not able to be upgraded to VFDs. Chilled water units are great targets for VFD upgrades. So we're moving -- we're getting close to the end here. So some of the key trends, just when I was talking about that small space kind of cooling in the smaller units, this goes into this whole kind of edge computing kind of theme that our industry's kind of really taking a focus on. So current data suggests that in North America there's 2.8 million -- call it small IT spaces. Now, what is the cap on that range? I don't know. I didn't -- I didn't get into that level of kind of research when I was putting this presentation together. But 2.8 million small IT spaces. And, you know, this is the edge computing, portals for clouds. All of those now are, you know, increasingly mission critical. So that's where the small space cooling, some of our single phase UPS products like we talked about in the previous presentation, integrated racks that may have UPS and power and monitoring built into them, can all be applied in these small spaces. And then, you know, facilities and IT and C-level managers, any survey that you see that they take about what's really important to them from an efficiency standpoint, you know, it's the air flow side for sure. And that's where our containment monitoring and some of the control opportunities we may be able to get ourselves involved in come into play. And certainly the ability to kind of see what's going on in your remote sites and in your small spaces. We have a wide variety of monitoring tools and infrastructure management or DSIM tools in our bag, you know, and those are coming in subsequent presentations on these Fridays. But the IT folks, you know, they're very interested now in addition to the facilities, people on that side, you know. And some of these organizations are still pretty highly siloed, but now when they've got compute horsepower in a remote site, they're very interested in the uptime and availability of those sites now because it can be a mission critical space. So they're putting their fingerprints on some of the designs and they're asking questions about, you know, it's not just good enough to have a vent in the ceiling in that small space anymore to get rid of heat. We're going to need to exhaust it better and we're going to need to cool that gear that's in that room more efficiently and with some more robust units. So everything that we have in our offering from the cooling side, from the airflow side, from the power side, I mean, when you're a total solution provider, I mean, these are the types of applications where there's really some meat to being able to make that claim. Kind of the last thing I wanted to go through were some kind of high-level qualifying questions. These can be kind of tossed out as you're doing a tour in a data center when you're with a facilities or IT guy in their space. And it's just kind of gets the discussion kind of moving in a direct, you know, in a direction where we can listen to them talk about kind of what keeps them up at night or where their pain points are. You know, and if they don't know some of this, you know, the temperatures that they're providing to their equipment, you know, knowledge is key. So anything we can help them with from a best practices standpoint about, you know, if it's really, really cold in the room, that's not a good thing. If it's really, really hot in the room, that may not be a bad thing. So we can consult with them on best practices as to what their environment has, what they're using to cool it, and how they're getting rid of the heat, and make some recommendations to optimize their facilities. So how are you managing your airflow? You know, containment is a key component to airflow efficiency. And it's not just the hot aisle and cold aisle containment. It's everything down to your basic building blocks like blanking panels, where you place floor tiles. Do you use brush grommets to cover up the holes? It's all that bypass airflow. You saw what the dollar amount of wasted energy for just one eight-by-six cutout could be. Think of a data center that has hundreds of those. Are you able to vary your cooling capacity with your IT load? I mean, that's where the whole VFD thing came in and why I wanted to kind of show you the slide on the VFDs. Because people may not know that those upgrades exist or that they're capable of. And quite honestly, some utility companies, and again, it's geography kind of dictates it, you know, in state-by-state, law-by-law. But some utilities companies will have incentive programs for VFD upgrades. So the end user may not even have to absorb the whole cost of the upgrade because of the amount of energy that can be saved as a result of doing that. Emerson recommends that, you know, controls should be not any older than five years. I mean, they like this ICOM system as a pretty innovative solution. And they feel that from a controls standpoint at the AC unit that five years ought to be something where you ought to have a trigger to say, I should try to take a look at maybe upgrading this. And, you know, the communication and coordination with one another, that ties back into that controls methodology as well. So if you can coordinate the different fan speeds, which units are on versus which ones are off, that's that lead lag kind of design. And eliminating fighting, that's what I described earlier, where a unit might be cooling, where the one next to it may be heating, or another one may be humidifying or dehumidifying. You want to coordinate all that because without it, that's another area of wasted energy, keeping your fan motors on all the time. And if it's a DX unit, now you've got the energy associated with the compressors that are in that system. Remember, on a chilled water side, we're just talking about fan energy. On the DX side, you've got the fans plus the compressors. So if you're able to optimize those units, it's, you know, you're not talking about nickels and dimes anymore. You're up in the dollars. So that kind of concludes the data center cooling 101. And I'm hoping that the few kind of key takeaways for you all are that it is the largest consumer of electricity in the overall infrastructure next to the IT compute. It is the largest area for efficiency improvements. And those kind of metrics there, the 3.5 times for tons of cooling to kilowatts, then you can kind of quickly ascertain that, man, this guy's got way too much cooling than he needs, than he has load to cool. So let's figure out what's going on there and maybe help him recoup some of that wasted energy. So we'll talk more about the actual solutions that we can pull out of our bag for airflow optimization on a subsequent call. But I'm hoping you all got at least a few things you learned about kind of the cooling side of things that you may not have known before. So if you have any questions, I'll take them now. Hey, Rob. [00:55:41] Speaker 3: Rob, of course, it's Nick. I work on the East Coast with a grid company, and they offered incentives for the end users, especially optimization and conservation, rather, of energy savings. And, you know, CF variable speed fans was part of that program. So have you worked with good companies that would, you know, share some of the cost up to almost 50% of an upgrade or an efficiency project? [00:56:14] Speaker 2: We have, except we didn't sell the VFDs. We had, companies have been incented that we've worked with, and most of the incentive work that came along from revenue for us were on some different ways of managing the airflow under the raised floor. And the actual distribution of the air, not the actual making of the cold air. But, yeah, I had mentioned that earlier. And it's, instead of program dependent, but VFD upgrades were always kind of part of the mix of where a utility company, because it's a big slug of any time a utility can find a way to reclaim kilowatt hours where they don't have to produce it. And it is in areas that are, you know, where you have grid congestion, like the Northeast. I mean, they're more receptive to offering up some bucks to help you fund those projects. [00:57:25] Speaker ?: Sure. [00:57:26] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not uncommon to offer some sort of rebates to upgrade. All right, I'm going to stop the recording here. I just wanted to say great job, Rob. I mean, God, if you didn't know anything about cooling, you do now. So let me stop the recording. [00:57:45] Speaker ?: All right. [00:57:45] Speaker 1: All right. [00:57:46] Speaker ?: All right. All right.