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When you’re recognized as a hip, environmentally conscious clothier whose brand names are status symbols among tots, tweens, teens and twenty-somethings, you had better run a pretty cool datacenter as well. Its mid-west campus is the hub of hip for this premium clothier. It’s also where the company’s global datacenter provides a steady stream of point-of-sale information from hundreds of retail locations for multiple clothing brands and coordinates orders from its web site, which ranks among the top 100 web retailers.
Challenge
The company recognized the need for a larger datacenter capable of 24×7 information-gathering to help it keep a pulse on sales and maintain a smooth distribution model. It designed a huge 6,000 sq. ft. datacenter with the capability to double in the future. The only challenge it still faced was choosing a power and cooling system capable of supporting the planned high-density “blade server farm” computing environment.
Solution
The clothier selected AFCO Systems’ patented Kool-IT™ technology, in order to support its 24×7 worldwide information needs in the most energy-efficient manner. The datacenter design plans and construction incorporated AFCO’s Kool-IT datacenter enclosures right from the start, resulting in an extremely efficient and unique design which employs both a raised floor to supply cooling and a lower ceiling that acts as a return plenum for directing cabinet exhaust.
Unexpected Benefits
As part of the datacenter’s commissioning process, the retailer hired an independent engineering firm to test the AFCO Systems Kool-IT datacenter enclosure systems using load banks to simulate heating and airflow. The firm also used sophisticated simulation software to model the datacenter using a traditional passive cabinet, hot-aisle, cold-aisle (HACA) cooling approach. The test results showed that the AFCO Kool-IT active high-density datacenter enclosures accounted for a savings of nearly one-third over traditional power and cooling methods – in this case a savings of $800,000 annually. By also utilizing “free cooling” methods to remove heat from water chillers as it is dissipated into the room, the retailer has been able to exceed American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) temperature guidelines.
AFCO recognizes the frequent dual commitment to customer satisfaction and energy efficiency in datacenter design and we’re proud to be selected for our leadership in providing power and cooling datacenter solutions.
