Vertiv Chilled Water Cooling Solutions for
Non-Raised Floor Application

The data center industry is experiencing fast-paced innovation. Hyperscalers, colocation facility providers, and other large data center owners and operators have led the way in implementing the latest compute, power, and cooling technology in their designs to meet growing market demand. They’re driven by a desire to optimize operations, reduce resource consumption, and decrease costs, among other goals. 

However, data center design and development challenges are increasing. Shortage of materials and costs are driving up construction costs and timeframes. That’s making it difficult to meet customer demand for new data center capacities in a 12-month accelerated timeframe, instead of the previous standard 18-month schedule. Further, data centers are densifying – placing more compute in tightly packed places to support big-data analytics and other digital workloads. That’s creating new burdens for cooling systems, which must protect these hot-running, often missioncritical, workloads. 

For decades, the common wisdom has been that data center owners needed to use raised floor environments to enable more efficient cooling of technology. 

However, colocation and hyperscale providers have been able to experience the reality of deploying data centers with simple slab, or non-raised floors, thanks to their use of different indoor chilled-water cooling solutions. 

The debate between whether to build a raised floor data center or one with slab floors is not an either-or decision, but one that requires careful consideration of business goals and technical objectives as described in this paper.