Keeping It Cool In Marlborough
PHOTO/BRANDON BUTLER
John Menoche with Coolcentric in Marlborough shows off the company's data center cooling product.
For John Menoche, a global services director at Coolcentric in Marlborough, seeing is believing.
It's one thing for his company to tell potential clients about the cooling systems for data centers the company makes. But it's a whole different story if he can show off the product in real life.
That's why over the past few months the company has built a new demonstration and testing room at its Marlborough headquarters.
"When we're talking about the product, customers want to see, touch and feel it," Menoche said. "There aren't many better ways to allow them to do that then to open up a door and show off...data being cooled down by our system."
Temperature Controlled
Companies with large server or data storage rooms traditionally have used a complex system of water-cooling pipes that ventilate cool air adjacent to the data centers.
Coolcentric has a completely different approach to decreasing temperatures. Instead of cooling down the entire room where the server or processor is, the company's product, named the LiquiCool Rear Door Heat Exchanger, attaches to the back of a server or storage unit and cools down the hot air as it is exhausted from the system.
The technique allows for a much more concentrated cooling process, meaning that unnecessary cold air is not being produced. That saves energy and money for the company, plus the system is generally smaller.
Inside the 350-square-foot demonstration room, potential clients can literally put their hands inside the data processing rack, where it is up to 105 degrees. Then, once the door is closed, the air exhaust is about 72 degrees.
The demonstration room also gives Menoche a place to train new employees on installing and repairing the systems.
Coolcentric is no stranger to thermal cooling products. The company's parent group, New Hampshire-based Vette Corp., began in 2004 by making cooling components for small devices. In February, Vette made Coolcentric its own brand and launched a new marketing campaign.
George Dannecker, president and CEO of Vette Corp., said the decision to break Coolcentric into its own brand earlier this year was an easy one.
Vette Corp. used to sell its cooling devices directly to data center manufacturers. Branding Coolcentric independently, however, allows Vette Corp. to sell its products directly to end users.
"Creating Coolcentric opened up an entirely new customer base for the company," he said.
The Coolcentric technology is actually licensed from IBM, which created the system for its own processors. Coolcentric took the design and made it compatible with about 80 percent of the sever racks that are sold today.
Coolcentric makes the hardware mostly in New York and China, but the company, which has about a dozen workers in Marlborough, has sales and service offices on the East and West coasts, as well as Taiwan and Hong Kong.
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