RagingWire Data Centers owns and operates 830,000 sq ft of data center colocation space in Sacramento, CA, and Ashburn, VA. Increasing demand for its colocation services had RagingWire expanding its Ashburn campus with a new 150,000-sq-ft facility along with its recently opened 180,000-sq-ft data center on its Sacramento campus. Key features of RagingWire’s innovative new facility include 100% uptime SLA for critical facility infrastructure, and 14.4 MW of critical IT load at a 2N+2 level of redundancy with a highly intelligent, self-healing infrastructure management system. The 2N+2 redundancies, with the ability to support ultra-high power densities at over 260 Watts/sq ft, distinguish RagingWire’s facilities.

With the company’s 100% 24/7 availability guarantee, a 100% reliable chiller solution was crucial.

“RagingWire is unique in the data center industry in that we design, build and operate our own facilities. Our patented 2N+2 design and in-house construction team allow us to build data centers with twice the redundancy of a traditional data center design at lower cost. Stellar Energy’s understanding of the cooling demands for data centers and their system performance guarantees were key reasons we selected them for this project,” says John McCrackin, RagingWire’s director of mechanical construction. Another key component for the cooling of RagingWire’s newest Ashburn facility was scalability and flexibility in order to keep up with the company’s rapid growth and expansion.

Solution

Stellar Energy’s modular water cooled chiller plant proved to be the best solution forRagingWire’s needs.

“Our self-contained chilled water production system for RagingWire features an efficient modular fabrication, built-in redundancy and environmentally efficient design,” explains Toby Lentz, Stellar Energy’s engineering manager.

The factory built approach offers several benefits, including a shortened construction schedule, improved safety, lower capital and operating costs, better construction quality control and reduced project risk. The modules utilize environmentally friendly non-ozone depleting refrigerant. Built-in redundancy and factory built and tested design ensures 24/7 performance for the mission critical computing systems housed in RagingWire’s facilities. Further, the modular solution provides scalability, flexibility and product engineering advantages that allows RagingWire to add cooling capacity as they need it, without any interruption to their critical facility operations.

Stellar Energy and Raging Wire coordinated very closely to develop a phased modular chilled water plant approach to meet the data center’s expanding cooling needs. Each phase of the modular chiller plant was designed with the installation of future phases in mind, walls and interconnecting mechanical, structural, and electrical components were engineered to allow for future expansion of the plant. To meet the redundancy requirements from RagingWire, mission critical components were selected and specified to meet the needs of each chiller module while other non-critical supporting infrastructure was designed to support full build-out of the modular chiller plant.

To date, Stellar Energy has delivered two 1,200 TR chiller modules and one auxiliary module. The RagingWire chiller systems consist of a York Model YK centrifugal chiller, 0.443 kW/ton with a coefficient of performance (COP) of 7.94 and a non-standard part load value (NPLV) of 0.247. They feature a unit mounted 460V variable-speed drive (VSD) with an IEEE active harmonic filter. Each chiller module contains a single Bell & Gossett (B&G) Model VSC double suction split case 60HP condenser water pump and a Bell & Gossett (B&G) Model 8G centrifugal base mounted 125HP chilled / process water pump. The design incorporated an APV plate-and-frame-heat exchanger for free cooling, furnished with 304SS 0.05mm plates.

The modular chiller plants were pre-engineered and fabricated with all system components at Stellar Energy’s Jacksonville, FL, fabrication facility. Packaged in a skid, the module was pre-piped, wired, tested and shipped to the Ashburn site where the RagingWire team handled installation, start-up and commissioning. Stellar Energy provided an on-site technical advisor for client support.

Says McCrackin, “Our RagingWire team prefers to self-perform key functions like installation, start-up and commissioning, and Stellar Energy’s cooperation made them a good partner for this team approach.”