nVent rear door coolers offer solution for high-density racks

Author: Isha Jain

nVent has announced the launch of its RDHX PRO rear door cooling unit, a new high-performance solution offering the capability to upgrade data centres with up to 83kW high-density racks, meeting the requirements for the growing use of AI-enhanced applications, demands for higher energy efficiency and sustainability, and the need for greater data centre space utilisation.

Rear door cooling solutions are increasingly popular as a pay-as-you-go method for retrofitting increased data centre cooling performance, in many cases without the need for additional re-engineering of the existing facility mechanical design. When installed as a primary method of heat removal, rear door coolers eliminate much of the need for mechanical equipment including fans, blowers and CRAHs, to provide a more optimised cooling solution aligned with the exact requirements for individual racks, at the same time reducing noise and energy waste.

Bringing flexibility to rack cooling

One of the features of RDHX PRO RDC is the ability to operate comfortably with 57°F (14°C) warm water cooling, making it environmentally friendly. By utilising free cooling, the device significantly reduces the amount of energy required to cool the data centre, not only reducing overall data centre power consumption but also the carbon footprint of operations.

The future-proofed solution can also be combined with direct-to-chip (D-2-C) liquid cooling deployments, for customers who are moving towards a hybrid approach to cooling, and especially those looking to maximise heat reuse opportunities, combined with NVent’s liquid cooling CDU 800.

Maximum compatibility and availability

The new rear door cooling units from nVent are offered in a range of standard sizes for use with 42U, 47U, 48U and 52U data centre racks, in both 600mm and 800mm widths. The coolers themselves are 250mm deep, one of the features of rear door coolers is that they are compact and do not require any additional floor space or ceiling headroom, it can free up white space compared to other competitor RDCs and cooling devices CRAH and CRAC units may be eliminated from the data centre.

Each unit has a maximum power draw of 1800W and features 12x axial brushless DC fans – more than any competitive unit. However, the large number of fans mean they individually do less work than a smaller number of large fans, reducing stress on the electromechanical devices and increasing their lifecycle. In the event failures do occur, nVent has developed an innovative, tool-less and hot-swappable method for fan replacement as well as other critical components such as PSUs. This feature allows uptime to be maximised at the same time as reducing service callouts and associated costs.

For ease of integration with data centre management applications as well as BMS software, the new rear door cooling units also feature a newly designed controller which is compatible with most popular network and control protocols including Web Interface, Ethernet, SNMP, Modbus TCP, RTU, and Redfish.

The new RDHX PRO RDC is available from September and will be on demonstration at DCW Paris and SuperComputing in Denver, Colorado, US.