In October 2017, I attended the Critical Facilities Summit that was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center in downtown Minneapolis. The summit featured educational sessions for continuing education credits on different tracks: cloud and colo trends, medical, labs, and life safety, optimizing uptime, project spotlights, the FM-IT link, and higher ed; an expo with companies highlighting their products; and data center/mission critical facility tours.

I attended several sessions in different tracks and was very impressed by the diverse array of topics, including Cooling Power Cuts Energy Use at NREL with Herb Zien, CEO LiquidCooling Solutions. I had the opportunity to speak with Herb over lunch during the conference about immersion technology. Herb said that the LBNL conducted a survey for the Navy on liquid cooling and found that the technology was 30 times more efficient than air cooled technology. Look for an article on this technology in 2018.

In another session titled, “Tier Wars: The Battle for Data Center Standards,” Mission Critical “Hot Aisle Insight” columnist Julius Neudorfer presented salient points from his recent article “Tier Wars,” which appeared in the 2017 July/August issue of Mission Critical. Julius also conducted Data Center Energy Practitioner (DCEP) training on Monday, October  23, for attendees.

Next year’s event will be held October 14-16, 2018 in Nashville at the Music City Center.