Precision & Liquid Cooling for Data Centres & Server Rooms

It is decided by kW per rack, the space you have and how much disruption you can accept. Up to about 5 kW a rack, comfort-grade cooling with good containment may cope. From 5 to 30 kW, precision and CRAC units or in-row and rack-based cooling are the usual answers, with chilled-water and modular systems taking over as halls get larger. Above roughly 40 kW a rack, air cooling stops being practical and liquid cooling takes over, using rear door heat exchangers, direct-to-chip cold plates or immersion. That is the range AI and HPC deployments now start in. Send us the rack count and the kW per rack and we will tell you which band you are in.

Start with the IT load, because almost all the electrical power drawn by IT equipment leaves it as heat. A rack drawing 5 kW rejects close to 5 kW of heat. Then add UPS and distribution losses, lighting, people and any solar gain through the building fabric, and size for the worst-case ambient your site actually sees rather than an average day. Redundancy is applied on top: N+1 means one spare unit beyond what the load needs. We run this as a free heat-load assessment rather than asking you to guess.

Comfort air conditioning is designed for people. It cycles on and off, removes a lot of moisture, and is sized for a room that is occupied during the day and empty at night. Precision cooling runs continuously at a high sensible heat ratio, which means nearly all of its capacity goes to removing heat rather than dehumidifying, and it holds both temperature and humidity inside a tight band around the clock. Air that is too dry causes static discharge, too damp causes condensation and corrosion, and equipment failure rates rise at both extremes.

Yes. Air cooling holds a rack to roughly 30 to 40 kW before the volume of air required stops being practical, and every current AI training platform starts above that line. We supply all three liquid routes: CRX4-RDX rear door heat exchangers from 25.1 to 65.8 kW per rack, CRX4-DLC direct-to-chip cold plate cooling with rack CDUs of 100 kW and row CDUs to 2020 kW, and CRX4-IMX immersion from 10 kW to 2 MW at up to 200 kW per cabinet. We size the loop, the coolant distribution and the heat rejection as one system, then install, commission and maintain it.

Somewhere around 30 to 40 kW a rack. Below that, well designed air cooling with sealed containment is usually the cheaper answer and we will tell you so. Above it, the airflow needed to carry the heat away becomes impractical to move and to contain, and the heat has to be captured closer to where it is made. Rear door heat exchangers cover roughly 25 to 66 kW a rack and retrofit into cabinets you already own. Direct-to-chip and immersion carry densities well beyond that.

A CRAC, or computer room air conditioner, has its own refrigeration circuit with a compressor and rejects heat through an outdoor condenser. A CRAH, or computer room air handler, has no compressor. It is a coil and a fan fed with chilled water from a central plant. CRAC units suit smaller rooms and sites with no chilled-water infrastructure. CRAH units are more efficient at scale, but only once there is a chiller plant worth sharing.

N is the number of units needed to carry the full heat load. N+1 means one additional unit beyond that, so any single unit can fail or be taken out for service without the room losing cooling. N+2 allows for two, and 2N duplicates the entire system. The right target depends on what an hour of downtime costs you and on your maintenance windows, because without redundancy every service visit is a risk.

It is driven by the kW of heat to be removed, the redundancy target, whether there is existing plant to connect to, and how hard the site is to work in, rather than by a per-unit list price. Adding an in-row unit to an existing room sits at one end of the range; a chilled-water plant with N+1 and new heat rejection sits at the other. Running cost matters as much as purchase price, and free cooling can cut the energy a system uses for much of the Australian year. Send us the load and the site and we will configure and price it.

An in-row unit takes a position in the rack row itself, drawing hot air straight out of the hot aisle and discharging cold air into the cold aisle. Because the air travels a metre instead of the length of the room, less fan energy is needed and hot spots are easier to control. It suits high density rows, rooms with no raised floor, and situations where you want to add cooling capacity to part of a hall rather than the whole thing.

Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. That covers replacing ageing CRAC units, adding capacity to a room that has run out of headroom, retrofitting containment to make an existing system work harder, and fitting rear door heat exchangers to specific racks rather than rebuilding a hall. We plan the changeover so the room stays within spec while the work happens, which usually means staging it across maintenance windows.

Yes. UPS Solutions designs, supplies, installs, commissions and maintains cooling across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, with local technicians in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and beyond. Maintenance covers preventive service, filter and fluid changes, refrigerant and leak checks, controls and 24/7 emergency response.