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Server Room / CRAC Cooling

Central Chilled Water for CRAC/CRAH Units

CRAC and CRAH units condition the room - the Advantage central chiller behind them is what actually removes the IT load's heat from the building.

CENTRAL CHILLED WATER

The Plant Behind
the CRAC Units

Computer room air conditioning (CRAC) and air handling (CRAH) units manage airflow and temperature at the room level, but CRAH units - and many CRAC configurations - depend on a central chilled-water loop to actually reject the heat the IT equipment generates. Sizing an Advantage central plant against the room's real IT load, including headroom for planned growth, is what keeps the room-level units able to do their job.

Facility uptime requirements typically drive the redundancy built into the chiller plant itself - N+1 or 2N configurations are common where the server room supports operations that can't tolerate a cooling interruption. That redundancy decision belongs at the central plant, not just at the room-level CRAC/CRAH units.

  • CRAH units and many CRAC configurations draw from a central chilled-water loop
  • Central plant sizing should include headroom for planned IT load growth
  • Redundancy (N+1, 2N) is typically built into the central plant, not just the room units
CRAC/CRAH unit at the end of a server rack aisle

Tell us the current or planned IT load in tons or kW, the facility's required redundancy level, and whether this is a new build or an expansion of an existing chilled-water plant, and we'll help size accordingly. See Central Chillers for indoor, outdoor and add-on module configurations that fit this kind of load.

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Sizing Server Room & CRAC Cooling

Server room chilled-water loops are sized off total IT heat load, converted to tons, plus a margin for the room's own losses and any planned growth. Because the load is continuous and the tolerance for an outage is low, sizing conservatively and building in redundancy both matter more here than in a duty that can tolerate a brief interruption.

Where a room already has CRAC units or in-row coolers installed, matching the Advantage chiller's supply temperature and flow rate to what those units were designed around avoids a mismatch that shows up as reduced cooling capacity even though the chiller itself is sized correctly.

Send Us

  • IT heat load in kW or tons, including planned growth
  • Existing CRAC/in-row cooler supply temperature and flow rate, if applicable
  • Redundancy requirement (N+1, 2N, or none)
  • Indoor or outdoor chiller placement

What Server Room Cooling Requires

Continuous IT Load

Uptime SLA

44-55°F Supply

Growth Margin

TYPICAL RANGES FOR SERVER ROOM DUTY

Facility Type Chilled Water Supply Load Profile Typical Redundancy
Edge / small server room 48-55°F Continuous, low variance N+1 or single unit
Enterprise data hall 44-50°F Continuous, steady N+1 standard
Mission-critical / colocation 44-48°F Continuous, steady 2N common

IT load density and the uptime the facility is committed to will move both the supply temperture and the redundancy away from these typical figures.
Call and talk it through with an engineer: 1-805-484-2992.

Matching a central plant to CRAC and CRAH units

Most server rooms land between 44 and 55°F supply - edge rooms toward the warm end, mission-critical halls at 44-48°F. The number that matters is the one the CRAH or in-row coolers were designed around. A chiller that is sized correctly but supplies warmer or slower water than those coils expect shows up as lost room capacity, and the chiller gets blamed for a loop mismatch.

At the plant. Doubling up room-level units does nothing if the single chiller feeding them trips, because CRAH units and many CRAC configurations have no cooling of their own. N+1 is the baseline for an enterprise hall; colocation and other mission-critical rooms usually go to 2N. Decide the uptime tier first and the chiller count follows from it.

Enough to cover the IT load you plan to install, not just what is racked on day one. Convert the kW to tons, add the room's own losses, then add the planned growth - and because the load is continuous, round up rather than down. An add-on module can bring capacity online later, but only if the loop was piped for it from the start.

It changes the whole selection. On an expansion we match the existing loop's supply temperature, flow and pressure so the new Advantage unit runs in step with what is already installed. On a new build the choice is open between indoor, outdoor air-cooled and modular central configurations. Tell us which it is along with the load in kW or tons, the redundancy tier and the placement.

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