IT Managers today are faced with a rapid increase in computer speed and processing power, which leads to higher electrical power supply requirements and increased heat generation from the computing equipment. This can create significant challenges to effectively cool the data center.

At the same time, the IT Managers are under increasing pressure to achieve cost reduction as well as demonstrate an adoption of environmentally-friendly Green IT solutions designed to reduce the carbon footprint of the enterprise. This can further compound the difficulty to find effective solutions to cool the data center.

As more computing equipment is added to a data center, the newer, high density and heat generating computer equipment is often times installed in the available free space which is further away from the traditional cooling infrastructure, such as computer room air conditioners (CRACs), computer room air handlers (CRAHs), etc. This hinders the cooling infrastructure’s ability to effectively cool the data center, which leads to data center hotspots.

Furthermore, high temperatures have been shown to reduce service life of the computing equipment and can also lead to catastrophic equipments failure. Data centers room typically use CRAC and CRAH cooling units, which provide the cooling air to the data centers. This cooling air is passively re-directed to the computing equipment via louvers located in floor tiles. A typical configuration of floor tile louvers rely merely on the pressure from CRAC unit to passively direct cooling air to the computing equipment and often times do not work effectively.

Universal brings Green IT innovation to data center cooling technology through the Thermal Control Unit (TCU). The TCU is an advanced under floor air-handling unit that introduces automated and dynamic cooling to cost-effectively enable data center evolution.