Data Centers
Cooling of Data Centers for the Department of Defense
The Department of Defense has embarked on a ten-year, $10 billion program called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) to transform and streamline the military’s IT requirements. For years, the separate branches of Intelligence and military have established and maintained their own IT cloud infrastructure. “The lack of a coordinated enterprise-level approach to cloud infrastructure and platforms prevents warfighters and leaders from making critical data-driven decisions at ‘mission-speed,’ negatively affecting outcomes,” a representative from the DoD states. “In the absence of modern services, warfighters and leaders are forced to choose between foregoing capabilities or slogging through a lengthy acquisition, rollout, and provisioning process.”
The infrastructure, in some cases, requires data centers and servers to be deployed in remote and environmentally unfriendly locations to support forward operations. Ameripack, Inc. is a major supplier of mil-spec, rack-mount cases for these server electronics.
According to Bob LeGrand, Director of Business Development at Ameripack, “We’ve worked with Aspen Systems for years now using their ECU’s to cool our operational transit cases with rack-mount communications electronics. These systems have been deployed to the CENTCOM AOR have been in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the data centers, the heat load is substantial where there may be four servers in a single case making active cooling essential.” Aspen’s ECU-1800 mil-spec air conditioning system was successfully used for the application . With 1,800 watts of cooling power it is up to the task. LeGrand added, “They’re placing these servers all over the world in various sites. The loaded case can weigh as much as 600 pounds and is, in some cases, dropped off a pallet out of the back of a C-130 transport plane. As far as the product goes, it’s bulletproof. In the case business, weight is everything. Size too is important. Aspen’s ECU-1800 perfectly fits the bill.”
The ECU-1800 weighs only 36 pounds with its compact package of less than 2 cubic feet.
According to LeGrand, “Customers love the low maintenance where they can simply hose it down to clean the air intake. Because of the popularity of the Aspen cooler, we developed a collar specifically for it to be easily mounted onto our cases. We can also seal up the case to protect the server electronics.”
