British cooling expert Excool is launching a German arm and pushing for more sales in the US.  Following successes with Virtus, Rackspace and Digital Realty for its adiabatic data center cooling systems, the company revealed its international campaign Datacenter Dynamics this week.

Excools’s indirect cooling systems keep data center equipment at its operating temperature using only outside air and water. The company claims to have created a market for low-carbon  data center cooling, and promises to have plenty of research muscle to keep ahead of competitors.

As well as cooling, the company launched its own Space range of modular data centers at DatcenterDynamics Converged in London in November 2014.

Designed from the bottom up

Mark Collins, director, Excool said: “We have designed a system from the bottom up with no compromises which works very well. We are proud of the fact that Digital Realty’s Profile Park, Dublin data center uses our cooling and that they are delighted with it. It is also saving them money. There are no compressors, it’s far less complex than most cooling systems and we are reducing the dependency on mechanical cooling. The largest energy consuming element apart from the IT load is the compressor. The solution is – reduce or completely remove dependency on mechanical cooling.”

Virtus Data Centres Ltd recently announced that its Virtus London 2 data center has been given the coveted Tier III certification and that it has deployed the Excool technology in this facility since it opened in 2014.

Six years of research and development

Excool says it put six full years of research and development into its cooling technology. The heat exchange matrix uses water evaporation when the temperature goes up so it can work allyear round. The company promises it can save up to 95 percent of annual energy costs on cooling, and allow an overall PUE (power usage effectiveness) below 1.1.

The system uses outside air indirectly through heat exchangers so no outdoor gets into the data hall. This gives a side benefit that air pollutants such as smoke and salt aerosols are kept out of the building, points out Collins: “Events that would previously have been disruptive, such as car-park vehicle fires leading to data center intake smoke ingestion do not affect our system since smoke passes through the exchangers and is eliminated - it doesn’t get into the building.”

With the use of specially designed adiabatic sprays the Excool product can maintain data center internal temperatures of 24C when the ambient temperature is more than 35C.

Sometimes treated with skepticism, adiabatic cooling is coming into its own, thanks to higher server inlet temperatures better air management techniques, says Excool.