APC’s EcoBreeze hits market

The APC by Schneider Electric, has introduced the EcoBreeze, a modular indirect evaporative and air-to-air heat exchanger cooling solution for data centers.

Vice President, Rack and Cooling Solutions at APC, Mr. Pat Johnson said that the EcoBreeze has the ability to switch automatically between air-to-air and indirect evaporative heat exchange to consistently provide cooling to data centres in the most efficient way.

He also said that EcoBreeze has been designed to be able to reduce energy consumption by leveraging temperature differences between outside ambient air compared to Information Technology (IT) return air to provide economised cooling to the data centre.

“The EcoBreeze meets ASHRAE 90.1/TC 9.9 requirements for efficiency and economisation with multiple frame sizes with varying voltages and phases to address any data centre’s cooling needs,” he said.

Johnson noted that as data centres constantly expand and local energy companies place heavy restrictions on a data centre’s ability to pull more power from the grid, there is an urgent need to reduce power consumption through energy efficiency and economisation.

“The EcoBreeze addresses the needs of today’s data centres by implementing multiple forms of economisation into each module. The unit, located outside the perimeter of the data centre, takes advantage of localised climates and can automatically switch between two forms of economised cooling,” he said.

Johnson explained that air-to-air heat exchange brings about hot IT air in from the data centre through the modules Electronically Commutated (EC) fans, which is then passed through internal channels of the Indirect Evaporative Cooler (IEC).

“After the IT air is cooled it leaves the IEC and passes through a cooling coil and is returned to the data centre,” he declared.

For the indirect evaporative heat exchange, he said that when ambient temperatures could not support an air-to-air heat exchange, cooling is done through indirect evaporative cooling, which removes heat from the IT air by evaporating water on the outside of the heat exchanger channels.

“The EcoBreeze is the first solution on the market that prevents the outside air from coming in contact with the data centre air, regardless of which cooling mode is used (air-to air or indirect evaporative),” he said.

The EcoBreeze, he said, has a proportional R410a refrigerant system as well as an onboard water treatment system, eliminating the need for chemical water treatment, stressing that this feature addresses environmental concerns associated with some refrigerant or water based systems.

“Both of the economisation cooling strategies employed by the EcoBreeze maximise localised climate conditions to ensure the most efficient and effective form of cooling throughout the year,” he said.

Emphasising that the EcoBreeze do not only provide multiple types of air economisation, but it’s modular design allows the unit to adapt to the future cooling needs of the data centre.

“These features, coupled with the fact that the unit uses outside air and is able to automatically switch to the most efficient of cooling modes, really set the EcoBreeze apart from other cooling solutions,” Johnson said.

Further, he said that when building new data centres, IT managers look to APC products and solutions to create the most efficient and adaptable facilities.

“We are always excited when we can offer a product like the EcoBreeze that can address both the immediate and future needs of the customer,” he said.

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