The Story
When Disney Stores was designing and building their data center for worldwide operations, Spectrum Mechanical was on the job. The directive was clear—the data center, and in turn, the cooling system, had to be “bullet-proof.”
The high-rise that housed the data center had a water-cooled chiller plant that Spectrum was to utilize to cool the new data center, which, in our estimation, was not a bullet-proof plan. We told Disney that this chiller could be susceptible to failure if the building were to lose water. Our recommendation was to install dual cooled Liebert units with chilled water as the primary and condenser water from remote dry fluid coolers with a closed loop, which did not require water, as a back-up redundant heat rejection source.
The primary mechanical engineering firm told Disney that this would be a waste of money—that the building system would not go down. When asked to guarantee this, they relented and agreed that there was a remote possibility that if the building lost water, it could go down.
Two months after we completed installation, the water main that supplied the building burst leaving the entire building without water and air conditioning for several days.
The data center, however, was fine.
The redundant dry fluid system we installed came on with no delay and the Liebert units maintained cooling in the data center throughout the water main repairs, allowing Disney Stores to continue with normal operations, worldwide.
Shortly thereafter, we received a call from Disney thanking us for our visionary thinking.