Case study video – COOLDC

Power Control
31 Jul 2019

CEO, Tim Chambers and Operations Director, Angela Meah of coolDC explain their experience working with Power Control in this video testimonial.


Video transcript:

In terms of coolDC, the name, what it means and our tagline – making the data centre world more cool, people assume that it’s about cooling and our cooling process, and it is in a way but not in the way that people perhaps think.

It’s a play on words, it’s a paradox because we’re attempting to make the data centre world more cool but we are trying to do that by operating at higher temperatures.

My name is Tim Chambers, I am the CEO of cool Data Centres. I have been involved in the data centre industry for over 30 years. A mixture of communications systems, the design, the build, the operations of data centre site.

My role within coolDC is to design energy efficient data centres for HPC clients and build financial business cases to allow these builds to take place.

My secondary role within coolDC is to inspire my team to drive the boundaries of engineering in areas such as liquid cooling, battery storage and energy reuse.

When we started looking for a UPS provider, the main drivers for us to find someone with experience but more importantly was the willingness to listen.

What we didn’t want to do is get dragged down in to old designs and old ideas. It was very important that the new data centres could actually take advantage of the changes within the UPS and changes of the data centre design.

One of the frustrations we had at the very start was that everyone wanted to support just the existing CHP supply in stage one and also support it with fixed UPS units which is totally against the grain of what we are trying to do.

The main part of the data centre design was to actually build an expandable and modular unit therefore fixed units were not the answer for us but unfortunately it was where everyone was trying to push us.

The Huawei units are very good for what we are trying to do where we are trying to build in modular fashion over around half a meg.

The beauty of the Huawei units are that it fits that there are some ways we would like to improve and I’m sure Huawei are trying to improve that and I’m sure working with Power Control we can drive that forward but as a unit it fits our building block quite nicely.

What went well from the Huawei for us is the fact that it did allow us to actually modularise and provide resilience at every stage.

We were looking for the benefit of running something that we could run very small at the start of the build and show that we could expand it and therefore keep the PUE low as the actual site grew so we could grow the units as and when we needed.

I think the major point of us working with power control is the designs are going to change, the plan is that we improve, we improve, we improve, therefore the UPS is a major part of this and working with Power Control we are confident that we can find bigger and better products.

The relationship with Power Control works really well. We have a connection at director level through Rob, who was originally involved in the project we have now got a dedicated account manager called Sam who works very well with the account and looks to how we are going to innovate in the future.

We also have great support from Chris, the engineer who helped us through the FAT test and also helped us with the installation on site.

The installation went very well it was managed very well from a communications point of view between Angela and Richard. Everybody turned up on time and everything was installed very quickly and very professionally.

For more information about Power Control and the products and services we offer please call 01246 431431 or email info@powercontrol.co.uk