FEATURE

Can you introduce yourself to our readers ?

I ’ m Mike Hayes , an application specialist at FlaktGroup , looking after the DENCO data centre range of products .

Can you tell us about some of the trends you ’ re seeing so far in the cooling space and how these impact you as a company ?

People can ’ t seem to build data centres quickly enough , which is great news for us . We ’ re seeing larger and larger data centres , we ’ re seeing higher and higher water temperatures . We can ’ t really call it chilled water anymore . We ’ re talking about temperatures of up to 25 degrees , no longer the old building services temperatures of seven degrees Celsius or even 10 degrees Celsius that came later . This of course is making things much more efficient . We ’ re talking about yearround free cooling , we ’ re talking about sometimes losing the refrigeration totally from the system . If you can cope with air going onto your servers at 28 degrees for a few hours in summer , then you don ’ t actually need any chillers or mechanical refrigeration . To put some numbers to it , we ’ ve installed over 180 MW of cooling in 2021 . And that gives you some idea of the range of products we have and what they ’ re doing .

What sorts of conversations are you having with existing and potential new customers about cooling ?

We ’ ve introduced DENCO as a brand name again – ‘ DENCO by FlaktGroup ’. FlaktGroup is a very large company of which DENCO is but one product . ‘ Flakt ’, by the way , is the Swedish word for ‘ fan ’, so we ’ re the fan group really , and within that we have DENCO products . We

Mike Hayes , Applications Specialist , FlaktGroup

started to use that brand name again and I think it ’ s really paying dividends . We ’ re having customers come to us and tell us they ’ re using some of our equipment and that it ’ s 15 – 20 years old . They then ask if we could perhaps refurbish or replace it . And that ’ s been missing for the past few years as people haven ’ t associated FlaktGroup with DENCO , but of course we ’ ve been in the data centre cooling industry for 50 + years .

What sorts of challenges are customers experiencing when it comes to cooling technology and how do your products help customers to tackle these ?

The big thing is energy efficiency for sure . Even at current power right usage rates a kW is worth £ 1,000 per year approximately , so if you can save 100 kW on your load that ’ s £ 100,000 per year . So the cost of energy is certainly going to help us to benefit our customers . As the costs go up the payback periods for some of the energy efficient systems come way down . We ’ re already looking at two years being a typical payback period for investing , for example , in the free cooling system rather than just a straight chill water system . And we see this trend continuing – data centres are getting more high density and we have to cope with that in terms of cooling by air . We ’ re looking at hooking into water cooling systems as well and we have all the products to do that . We have fan walls , air handling units of all sorts of types , adiabatic cooling , run-around coils , free cooling systems , typically glycolbased free cooling systems . You name www . intelligentdatacentres . com

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