Air conditioning manufacturer Airedale and cabinet maker Prism launched the OnRak rear door heat exchanger.
The product is described as medium to high density with an EER of up to 174 and optional n+1 redundancy. It deals with the heat load at source by managing discharge temperatures from the server into the aisle space. An expandable cooling system can be supplied with an industry standard data rack (42 - 48U) or a mating frame to fit a customer-specific rack.
Airedale marketing manager, Fin Farrelly: "The launch was a great success with a high quality of attendees, who welcomed such an innovative product and expressed interest in it for many different applications. The OnRak was very well received on both days of the launch, with a lot of interest in the product and very positive feedback."
The manufacturer said that over a year, an OnRak with an EER of 144 will consume only 1,410kWhs of power against 11,388kWhs consumed by a traditional close control unit with the same capacity, representing 88% saving in power input.1 The EER is a means of comparing efficiency and the ratio of cooling divided by power input. To increase uptime, the OnRak's optional n+1 fan configuration is so designed that its four fans run at 75% capacity during normal operation. If one fan fails, the other three immediately speed up to 100% to provide the same total amount of cooling and maintain temperature control.
They then modulate back when a fourth fan is in operation again. As a standard redundancy feature, all fans are 'hot swappable'.
Multiple OnRak units can be linked with an Airedale large capacity air cooled chiller to create an integrated, flexible cooling solution for the data centre. Substantial energy savings are achieved when the OnRak is matched with a free-cooling chiller. Since free-cooling operates with as little as 1ºC differential between ambient and return fluid temperatures, the continuous system operation and the high temperatures of a data centre environment in relation to ambient air, mean that a free-cooling chiller will use very little mechanical cooling.

The OnRak system
Airedale's free-cooling chillers are designed with integrated, simultaneous mechanical / free-cooling achieving 0-100% free-cooling and will always use free-cooling first before initiating mechanical cooling.