Raymond and Dave explore the evolution of data center cooling technologies from the 1980s to the present, into the transition from traditional air cooling to modern liquid cooling methods while addressing the increasing thermal demands of AI-powered data centers. They highlight the innovative Vertiv™ CoolPhase Flex solution—formerly referred to as the DH400—a hybrid unit offering unmatched flexibility in accommodating both air and liquid cooling without altering data center designs.
Throughout the episode, insights into data center energy efficiency, the technological journey from Liebert to Vertiv, and the significance of adaptable cooling solutions are offered, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of current data center cooling trends.
Timestamped Overview
00:00 Intro
03:38 Pivot from Engineering to Sales
06:54 Liebert’s Early Talent Development Program
11:06 Tech Advances in Room Temperature Efficiency
14:42 Optimizing HVAC Efficiency and Control
17:19 Emerson’s Network Power Divestment 23:28 Evolution of Cooling in Computing
26:54 Pumped Refrigerant Breakthrough
29:33 Outdoor DSE Pump Solution
31:01 Flexible Chilled Water Unit Development
Episode Transcript:
Dave Rubcich:
Nobody today can tell you definitively. Well, 20% of my load’s going to be air cooled, 80 percent’s going to be water cooled, and on day one, it might be 90% air. Day four, it might be 50 50. The reality is nobody knows. Nobody knows. As we started talking more and more about the idea of the cool pace, flex of a hybrid unit can operate in either mode of operation, everybody realized the true value of having this solution and the benefit of the flexibility.
Raymond Hawkins:
Well, welcome again to another edition of Not Your Father’s Data center. I am Compass’s Chief Customer Officer, Raymond Hawkins and your host. We are always excited to be joined by folks from the data center business and help us understand a little bit more about what is driving the digital infrastructure in our world today. Today our friends from Vertiv have loaned us the global Vice president of key accounts, multi-tenant data centers, longtime veteran Invertive, Dave Rubic out of Ohio, Archie and Westerville. Do I got that right, Dave?
Dave Rubcich:
Yes, I am. Thank you for having me on today, Raymond.
Raymond Hawkins:
Well awesome for you coming and joining us, Westerville just north of Columbus, if I know my Ohio geography, right. Tell us a little bit about you in the early days. Where’s home? Is Ohio home? Where’d you grow up? I doubt you went to college and said all I ever want to do is cool data centers. So tell us about your hopes and dreams and how you got into this business.
Dave Rubcich:
Sure. So born and raised in Ohio, actually grew up in eastern Ohio, down in the Ohio Valley, near Wheeling, West Virginia. Ended up going to college in Cincinnati, so I’m a proud Bearcat.
Raymond Hawkins:
All right.
Dave Rubcich:
Grew up as a Buckeye fan. Went to college in Cincinnati, so my allegiance has totally changed.
Raymond Hawkins:
I was just going to say that’s got to be a little bit of a split there, a lifetime Buckeye fan and going to the Bearcats.
Dave Rubcich:
It is, and it’s a little tough living in Columbus.
Raymond Hawkins:
Oh yeah, that’s right. Yeah. You’re flying the sensei flag there, but
Dave Rubcich:
I am.
Raymond Hawkins:
But you were in the heart of Buckeye country.
Dave Rubcich:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Raymond Hawkins:
Down there in southeastern Ohio. Sorry for those of the folks that aren’t as fascinated by Ohio as Dave and I might be. Ohio University, is that down in the southeast?
Dave Rubcich:
That is southern Ohio, yeah, down in
Raymond Hawkins:
Athens. Yeah, Athens. Yeah, Solage boy, the guy from Nebraska went there and
Dave Rubcich:
Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. Well, he’s from the area he went to. Of course, he went Ohio State and then transferred to LSU, but he grew up in Athens.
Raymond Hawkins:
Just shows what a great job Ohio State does. Preparing quarterbacks for success.
Dave Rubcich:
Absolutely.
Raymond Hawkins:
Then he went to LSU. So I’m an SEC guy. I’m a diehard Auburn guy. I’m actually recording today from the Compass office annex in Auburn, Alabama, and I will say having been at the Auburn LSU game in 2019, that Joe Burrow performance, not only in that game, but that season might be the best college quarterback season I’ve personally witnessed. There may be betters, but man, he was unbelievably accurate, unbelievably resilient, unbelievably tough. Just an incredible gamer. That’s as impressed with the college quarterbacks I’ve ever been right there in your backyard.
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah, he’s really good. And he’s proven that in the NFL.
Raymond Hawkins:
Okay, so lifetime in Ohio, you went to the Bearcat, you didn’t study data center cooling at Cincinnati. What did you study?
Dave Rubcich:
No, electrical engineering didn’t really, honestly, when I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I’ve always been good in the math and sciences and there was a lot of demand for engineering, so I knew I could get a job, but as I went through my college career, did some co-oping, the idea of being glued to a desk every day didn’t quite appeal to me. And I had some friends started talking about technical sales, and I liked the idea of going out and seeing customers and seeing new applications, being in factories, different things. And I thought, well, let me give that a try. If I can’t sell anything, I can always default and go back and be a quote engineer. And almost 40 years later, I’m still trying to figure out if I can be a sales guy.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah, I hear you. You and me both. I stumbled out of college into the technology business in the late eighties, and I joke with my kids all the time. They’re like, Dan, we’ve always had computers. I’m like, no, baby. We haven’t always had computers. We used to have posters in the walls in the office someday there’ll be a computer on every desk. So by early tech computer days, I mean, we’d go to offices and they literally, there wasn’t a computer in the building, not one.
Dave Rubcich:
When I started, our admin had the loan computer for all of our quotes and everything. We’d fill out forms, give to that person, and they would generate everything.
Raymond Hawkins:
Dave, did you ever get a Green Bar report?
Dave Rubcich:
No, I’m not sure I know what a green bar report
Raymond Hawkins:
Is. So the big computer paper, the reels on the dot matrix,
Dave Rubcich:
And
Raymond Hawkins:
One line was green and one line was white, green, white, green, white, green, white.
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah.
Raymond Hawkins:
So we call those green bar reports. Sorry, but
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah,
Raymond Hawkins:
I say that my kids are like, what are you talking about? I’m like, yeah, we program computers on cards.
Dave Rubcich:
And
Raymond Hawkins:
They’re like, what?
Dave Rubcich:
Punch cards? Yeah, Fortran
Raymond Hawkins:
Punch cards. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Dave Rubcich:
Through all that.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah, and he’d run your cards through and see if your program worked. You’d slide ’em in this wooden slot and the guy hand them back to you and tell you if your program worked and give you your green bar report. Those were the days
Dave Rubcich:
My kids. Yeah, we would grab other guys’ cards and put ’em out of order
Raymond Hawkins:
If you changed ’em out of order and mess ’em up. That’s right. That’s actually right. They had to be in order. That’s exactly right. Boy, man. So the computer business, you and I have both been lucky to stumble into that business in the eighties and what a blessing that has been for me. I left selling technology about 11 years ago now and got in the data center business. So tell me, did you leave electrical engineering and go out to be a sales guy and get right into I was it cooling? What were you all selling?
Dave Rubcich:
When I was coming out of college, I was interviewing with numerous companies. Liebert Liebert at the time was one of the companies I interviewed with, and I had several job offers. Liebert was the one that was really the technical sales job versus engineering jobs. And interestingly enough, I won’t make this a long story, but my dad was an HVAC mechanic and he was familiar with Libert equipment and he talked highly of the company, knew more about it than I did at that time. He said, this is a really good company, you should really look into it more. But long story short, I ended up hiring him with the company out of college in those days when Liebert was founded in 1965, it was all computer room cooling,
And in the late seventies, early eighties, Liebert was expanding into power conditioning and uninterrupted power supply systems. And so at that time, because we were growing dramatically and we primarily go to market through manufacturers reps, Liebert decided that they would recruit and train engineering students coming out of college. And after they trained them through a four to five month program, they would make graduates of the program available to the reps to hire. And that’s how we partly took on the ownership of building out the Salesforce and training ’em to sell power equipment. So I came into the company through that program, was fortunate that after I came out of the program, I was placed in our Columbus office, which was a factory owned office versus an independent manufacturer’s rep. And that kept me within the company, so to speak. And it started my career where I’ve had numerous career advancements, but always in some type of a sales or sales management role.
Raymond Hawkins:
Well, I’m not trying to date you, so you can punt on this if you want, but I’m going to guess this is the late eighties when you’re coming out and going to work for Levi.
Dave Rubcich:
1986. Yeah, 86.
Raymond Hawkins:
And so they started out cooling data centers, and I can’t tell you how many computer rooms, and I tease people, we call ’em DP rooms, the data processing room, and there’d be a big lever with a black lever with a black little handle on it that you would turn, and things were huge, right? Size of six or eight refrigerators and it would sit in the corner and make God awful noise and we’d cool the rooms to 60 degrees. I mean, just sound like you had a hurricane sitting over there, but we made ’em just crazy
Dave Rubcich:
Cold.
Raymond Hawkins:
And I’d love it if you would, because this is something I think, I mean you were cooling data centers, you were cooling data processing rooms, computer rooms, whatever they would be called. You were cooling those things in the eighties. We used to think you had to keep the room freezing. Will you take the folks that listen to us? I mean with your experience and your exposure, how have we changed the idea of heat rejection in the data center? What were we doing then versus how we do it now? And will you talk us just a little bit through that
Dave Rubcich:
Journey? Sure. And I think part of the change there is the technology itself on the data center side. So you mentioned the green line reports back in those days in the, we didn’t call it data center, we called it a computer room, and we were keeping everything. Generally the normal conditions were 72 degrees and 50% humidity, give or take, but it felt like sometimes it would be 60 degrees in there.
Raymond Hawkins:
Well, as you walked by, if walked the libert, it was colder than that because you were getting hit with all the air.
Dave Rubcich:
And I can remember being in many, many data centers where a lot of the operators worked in the data center, and you’d have ladies that would be wearing sweaters and they would, they would change the set points on the to try to keep themselves warm.
Raymond Hawkins:
Just like today, we just let ’em go in there and change the set forth.
Dave Rubcich:
But you think about, I mentioned humidity control. So back when we had all those dot matrix printers and everything, if the humidity was too low, you’d get static. If the humidity was too high, the paper would jam.
Raymond Hawkins:
So
Dave Rubcich:
We really had to keep pretty tight tolerances on humidity. And then you had spitting tape drives and a lot of other rotary type devices in the data center,
Raymond Hawkins:
Much more analog style in that day for sure.
Dave Rubcich:
Yes. Yeah, analog equipment. And then back, I started back in the mainframe days, like the 38 ones, the 30 80 nines, we provided water cooling, which it’s interesting how now the industry is coming back liquid, we come back around liquid cooling.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah,
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah, yeah. Which I’m sure we’ll probably hit on that topic. We’ll, liquid. Cool. Yeah,
Raymond Hawkins:
We’ll spend a minute on that.
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah, but you’re right. I mean, you think about where we’re at today where we’re trying to be more green and sustainable, and now we’re running much higher temperatures and much higher deltaT. So we’re trying to drive supplier temperatures as high as we can to make the equipment more energy efficient.
Raymond Hawkins:
So Dave, you alluded to the fact that the technology in the room has changed, right? We’re not doing matrix printers or we’re not hanging tapes anymore. So thankfully those days are behind us, but is it part of why we’re running the rooms at warmer temperatures, not just that it eats up less energy and it’s more efficient, better for the environment, costs less money, but we comfortable that the meantime to failure wasn’t materially changed. The difference between running a room at 68 degrees and 76 degrees, it didn’t have a material impact on meantime to failure. And we as an industry over years got comfortable that we didn’t have to be down that low. That’s a dumb guy version of it. Is that right?
Dave Rubcich:
You are 100% correct. Yes. And we follow a lot of the industry recommendations and standards from ASHRAE and the IT industry, the nabs and communications, and a lot of those standards have changed over the years, and they’re a lot more tolerant now of the operating windows that we can operate at wider ranges of temperature and humidity, understanding that it’s not going to have a negative impact on the reliability or failure rate of the equipment.
Raymond Hawkins:
So I have a degree in basket weaving from an SEC school. You have a degree in electrical engineering from a distinguished school like Cincinnati, you brought up delta T. So we’re going to let you take a crack at explaining delta T because we have had this conversation on the podcast a couple of times, and I explain to people, it’s where you put two tailbacks on either side of the quarterback and then that way they can fake how he hands it off and you don’t know which way it’s going, and that has not resonated with most of my audience. So I’m going to let you handle delta T, and I’ll just stick with the wing T.
Dave Rubcich:
Okay. So I’ll describe, I love your analogy, but maybe I should run a single wing offense instead.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah, probably better.
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah. So I guess the way I would think about it, easiest way I could describe Delta T, if you’re in terms of cooling, you’ve got the supply air, what we’re pumping out into the room, which is the temperature we want to maintain the space at. And as that air is passing through all of the IT load, it’s absorbing that heat and returning it back to be conditioned. Just as an example, if I’m delivering 75 degree air into the space and I’m returning 95 degree air, the delta T is 20 degrees. It’s the difference between the return air temperature and supplier temperature.
Raymond Hawkins:
I’m guessing, and again, I will demonstrate that I went to an SEC school and studied basket weaving. You can manage that spread on either end. I’m guessing you could push the cooling temperature lower, you can push more air, and I’m guessing increase the CFM and that would help your intake air. There’s multiple dials you can play with there, right?
Dave Rubcich:
You’re absolutely correct, and unfortunately, one of the things that we find today is many data centers will be designed at a certain delta T. It might be 20 degrees, might be 22 degrees, and the higher the delta T and the higher we drive the return air temperature, the more efficient the data center is.
Raymond Hawkins:
So if I’m comfortable with a 30, and I’m going to say this in non-electrical engineering terms, if I’m comfortable with a 30 degree delta T, I’m allowing my air, I’m pushing into the room to absorb 30 degrees of heat before it exits the room. That’s a lot. If I squeeze that down to 15 degrees, I’m saying I don’t want that air to absorb near as much heat before it gets back in the cycle. And so that’s a harder workload if there’s a better way to say
Dave Rubcich:
That. And when you think about the rooms that are designed and then how they’re actually operated, if you’re not at full load and if you’re over provisioning the air, meaning I’m delivering more air than I need, then that air is going to return back to the unit instead of it 20 degrees, 15 degrees maybe. So you’re providing more energy in moving air with fans than is really needed. So with controls today, we want to separate the control of the fans that deliver just the right amount of air so that we’re getting that delta T, and we want to separately control the capacity of the unit. So we’re not over cooling space. We want to maintain a constant supplier temperature, regulate the fan speed to maintain a constant,
Raymond Hawkins:
And we can dial in those fans pretty meticulously today, can’t
Dave Rubcich:
We? Yeah, because they’re variable speed fans.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yes, sir. Right, right, right. A lot different than the leberts I walked by in the eighties versus what we are doing today. Walk us through how did it go from Liebert to Vertiv? What happened, who got bought, who got merged? What changed? Do you mind us walking through the history of that? I know there are some people in our business that are as old as you and I that would love to hear the connection. I don’t think I can describe
Dave Rubcich:
It. Yeah, I’d be happy to walk you through that. So Liebert was founded by a gentleman by the name of Ralph Liebert in 1965. Just again, I’ll make the story quick, but Ralph was a mechanical contractor. He was very innovative. He was involved in helping the patent, the freeze drying process very wise HVAC mentality. And back in the sixties, if you recall, was when the first mainframe computers were coming to market, and he was getting involved in these applications where he was doing buildup systems to do temperature and humidity control. And so he got the idea of building a packaged unit that could do both the temperature and humidity in a single unit. He took that idea and basically started Libert Corporation. So the Libert name came from the founder of the company, and that was in 1965. Then I joined the company in 1986, and about six months after I joined the company is when it was announced that we were going to be acquired by Emerson Electric, and we operated under Emerson for roughly 30 years, and Emerson had five major platforms at the time of the very conglomerate of different businesses, but one of their platforms, they called it network Power.
There was a lot of synergy between those companies. So asco, which made transfer switches, which is a big part of the data center industry. You put that on your generator to switch power. ASCO and Liebert were a two big building blocks of the network power platform, and they bought a bunch of other Bolton companies like DC power companies, transient voltage search suppression racks, just other companies like that that were all synergistic. So we had a whole platform that really served the data center and the telecommunications market. So I said we operated under Emerson for about 30 years. In 2016, Emerson decided to divest of network power. I think part of their thinking at that time was Emerson is very good at being a best cost producer, and they make things like compressors and garbage disposals and different things like that. So they’re very good at making a few variations of something and making many, many, many units over time. Think about different models of garbage or disposals and rator, things like that. Liebert didn’t fit that business well because every job can be a snowflake. There’s variance and also the pace of change coming on. By the time they sold us where we need to turn over our product platform, our portfolio in three years, not 20 years. So I think maybe other reasons that led to them also, but Emerson decided to divest of the whole platform. And so we were bought by Platinum Equity private equity firm, and that’s when we changed our name to
Raymond Hawkins:
Vertiv. What year was that, Dave?
Dave Rubcich:
That was 2016.
Raymond Hawkins:
Okay. So not quite 10 years ago.
Dave Rubcich:
And we went public then. I think it was either 20 19, 20 20, right in that timeframe is when we went public.
Raymond Hawkins:
Okay. That’s a super helpful understanding of the journey. Am I losing my mind or did Liebert Line operate with that name inside of Emerson? It did, weren’t there still? Okay. Okay. I thought so because I was like, I know I’ve seen Liebert gear long past 1988, so it was still, the product line was just an Emerson company, but the product line was still Liebert.
Dave Rubcich:
Correct. And we still have different products that we’ll call it a Libert something or other, but when you look at the product, it’s going to have the Verto badge on it,
Raymond Hawkins:
But it was just in that thermal management, I think is what you called it. Division of Emerson. Yeah.
Dave Rubcich:
Got it. Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah.
Raymond Hawkins:
Got it. Okay, cool. That’s helpful. I did not know when people would say to me like, Hey, these guys are great. And they’re like, oh yeah, that came from Liebert. I’m like, wait a minute. Did what? I did not know the history there. Okay, so you took the IV name in 16, went public in 19. So you have been in the Columbus office for four decades despite the changes around you. So you are institution, I’ve got to think inside Vertiv slash Libert land,
Dave Rubcich:
As I say it now, I’m in the 1% club. So one of the amazing things about this company is the number of people that have worked their lives here. It’s not uncommon to have people retiring at Liebert that have been here for 45, close to 50 years. It truly is a,
Raymond Hawkins:
That’s
Dave Rubcich:
Pretty awesome, and it’s rare to see. But
Raymond Hawkins:
Was Mr. Liebert a Columbus guy? You said it was a corporate office. Was he from Ohio? Okay. I didn’t know that either. Okay.
Dave Rubcich:
I think he might’ve originally been from Cincinnati, but he moved up to Columbus and he had another business called Capital Refrigeration before Lever. Over the years, I always felt like a rookie. Even I’d been here 25 or 30 years. I look at the guys above me that have been here 40 plus, but now that I’ve been here 38, I look around and see who’s been here as long as I have or even longer. I’m in that, I’ll say the 1% club now,
Raymond Hawkins:
Those young bucks that are having their 25th anniversary, you’re like, welcome, newcomer.
Dave Rubcich:
Well, I actually have a guy that reports to me that just had his 25 year anniversary last week, and I was kind of joking too about that.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah, I remember when I had my 25th anniversary back in the nineties. It was great.
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah,
Raymond Hawkins:
Pretty awesome. That’s good stuff. Alright. Alright. Well so appreciate here and your Ohio history. Appreciate here. I had no idea. 38 years. That’s pretty awesome. Thank you for telling us the Lieber to IV journey and the Emerson Way station in middle. That’s pretty cool. Let’s talk a little bit about a couple more subjects you mentioned, and I have a lot of fun with with the younger people on the team. They go, Hey, we’re going to do liquid cooling because AI speeds up so much power. And I’m like, Hey guys, we have done liquid cooling from the beginning. We were liquid cooling computers before anybody did air I and I loosely explained it to him, I said, Hey, we got away from liquid cooling because we didn’t need that much thermal capacity. One, computers and water don’t like each other two and three, it’s expensive. And so we found a more efficient, both from a economically efficient methodology, less risky methodology, and one that you didn’t need the same thermodynamic properties of water to do it with air. I said we started with water guys, that’s how the world started. Cool computers. We moved away from it. It’s just now that we are producing so much heat that we can’t reject that heat effectively with just air anymore. And so all things old become new again. So you alluded to water talk to folks that listened to us talk ’em a little bit through when you started. We were doing some liquid cooling, still was in the marketplace and then it went away. Then we did air and now it’s back. So talk us through that journey.
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah, so as I said, when I started, it was the mainframe days and for those who are listening and remember the mainframes, it was primarily a water cooled unit that the IBMs of the world or the M dolls or the NECs, they provided that unit that sat next to their mainframe device and we would provide a chiller that was in the room. It looked just like the Liebert crack units and it was sized to support that mainframe and we’d provide the chill water that ran out into their CDU where much today with the CDUs that we provide basically a heat exchanger where we’re isolating the water that, and I think they used dielectric water that went internal to their mainframe. And then we started probably what, maybe the early nineties, getting into more distributed computing. And I specifically remember around the turn of the century, right around 2000 is when the introduction of the one U pizza box servers came into the market and everybody was talking about 20 KW rack. I got these one U pizza box servers
Raymond Hawkins:
Going to stack them in there.
Dave Rubcich:
Right? I can put 42 of these.
Raymond Hawkins:
I’m going to 42 of them in there. That’s right,
Dave Rubcich:
Exactly right. They’re like, how are we going to cool this?
Raymond Hawkins:
We’re have 42 of ’em, and you can slide a sheet of paper between each one. It’ll be fine.
Dave Rubcich:
Correct. We actually at that time right around, I can’t remember exactly, it was around 2000, 2001, we bought a small company in Mountain View California called Cooly. And Cooly was developing cold plate technology and liquid cooling. And so we developed a product that we called Libert XD X meat for extreme density,
Raymond Hawkins:
20 kilowatts of rack. It was
Dave Rubcich:
Extreme 20 kilowatts of rack, and we were pumping a refrigerant around and we had different types of modules, ceiling mount in the row and sitting on top the rack to cool these, call it 2025 kw, 30 KW racks. It was very efficient. We ended up probably selling more of those systems due to the efficiency than because of the need for the high heat load for two reasons. One, even though everybody said, oh, racks are going to go to 20 KW per rack, what do you think the average is today in the data center? The average density in Iraq today?
Raymond Hawkins:
Well, it’s still not 20,
Dave Rubcich:
Right?
Raymond Hawkins:
I bet it’s 1415.
Dave Rubcich:
I would say it’s maybe around eight.
Raymond Hawkins:
Oh, okay.
Dave Rubcich:
So we never saw the actual densities get to where the market said it was going. And then we also,
Raymond Hawkins:
Can I stick a pin in that for a second?
Dave Rubcich:
Absolutely.
Raymond Hawkins:
I think that’s true today too.
Dave Rubcich:
It is.
Raymond Hawkins:
People are telling us we’re going to get, I’m going to have 300 kilowatts of rack. Okay.
Dave Rubcich:
But we’ll come back to that when we talk about what’s happening now.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, I hear you. Yeah, yeah,
Dave Rubcich:
Let’s come back. We’ll talk about that. But the other thing, in addition to the fact that the loads weren’t there, we also as an industry figured out we can cool 20 KW or 25 KW rack with air. In fact, we’re doing it probably much higher today.
Raymond Hawkins:
Maybe
Dave Rubcich:
30, 40, 50 KW rack,
Raymond Hawkins:
Which just fairly commonplace. If you tell the guy tells you need you to cool 25 kilowatts of rack, none of us break out in a sweat about
Dave Rubcich:
It. Right. But back in 2000, nobody thought that was possible. So everybody was kind of pushing the panic button.
Raymond Hawkins:
We also thought all the computers were going to shut down at midnight too. So
Dave Rubcich:
That’s exactly right.
Raymond Hawkins:
That’s another podcast we’ll get to
Dave Rubcich:
Having
Raymond Hawkins:
Both having, I’m certain we were both sitting in data centers on New Year’s Eve of 1999.
Dave Rubcich:
Well, I wasn’t know what your social life was, but I
Raymond Hawkins:
Was in a data center,
Dave Rubcich:
But Y2K going to be Armor Gut for all of us.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah, well, that’s another podcast we’ll get back to. Cool. Sorry.
Dave Rubcich:
But the interesting thing about that acquisition of Cooly, we literally were 20 years before our time, but that acquisition allowed us to develop because we were doing pumped refrigerant. If we turned ahead to what Compass is deploying today, it’s also a pumped refrigerant technology. It’s a little bit different, but it’s because of what we learned to do with that acquisition of Cooly that later on helped us to develop our, we call it the libert DSE, but it’s a pumped refrigerant. And so while we were, like I said, 20 years ahead of where the market is now going with liquid cooling, that acquisition really led us to being able to innovate and do some other things with pumped refrigerant.
Raymond Hawkins:
I gotcha. Interesting stuff. All right. So that leads us a little bit into, you said, let’s talk about what’s going on today. All things are new again, or there’s nothing new under the sun. I’m not sure which is a better way to say it, but we’re back to thinking about, Hey, I’ve got to get liquid cooled in the data center, enter in the Compass and Vertiv partnership, and us going, okay, my customers are saying here, Raymond, I’m not sure how much liquid cooling I’m going to need, but I know I’m going to need it. So help me plan for that. And that leads us into our conversation and partnership with you guys. So will you talk us through a little bit of what you saw there?
Dave Rubcich:
When we started our relationship with Compass, I guess I’m going to say it’s 6, 7, 8 years ago. Compass at that time was deploying rooftop air units in some of your data center designs. And then you pivoted to a more efficient technology, which was a heat wheel.
Raymond Hawkins:
That’s right. The Kyoto units. That’s right.
Dave Rubcich:
Yep. The Kyoto Heat Wheel. And Compass was having some operational challenges with the Kyoto Heat Wheel Fair way to say, as for some other companies. So we had this pump refrigerant technology that we called the DSE.
We had that in different form factors in an indoor split unit. And as we were having companies come to us trying to figure out what solutions we could offer to help them with their heat wheels or replacing of heat wheels, we were looking at maybe doing evaporative cooling and different things. And we realized we’ve got the technology with the DSE pump refrigerant. We just need to make it in an outdoor package solution. So when we designed it, we’d intentionally designed it, so it would be almost a drop in replacement for the Kyoto Heat wheel, same footprint, et cetera. So again, for your listeners, we’ve been deploying that technology. Compass has been deploying it for the last six, seven years from Verta,
Raymond Hawkins:
I was going to say sevenish years now.
Dave Rubcich:
And so it’s an air cooled system, but with the pumped refrigerant economizer, when it’s wintertime and cooler temperatures, it’s not using mechanical cooling. It’s just pumping a refrigerant. Very efficient. Now, to answer your question about how did the cool phase flex become into play back last spring, your team approached us about, as you’re thinking about going into how do you convert your data centers to adapt and support a liquid cool design, I think it’s more of a perception versus reality, but there’s a wide perception in the industry that if you’re going to do liquid cooling, you just have to go chill water.
And I think the initial request that Compass asked of Vertiv was, Hey, we don’t want to have to change our building design. So could you make a chill water unit that basically fits in the same footprint or format of the building where we deploy the DP 400? And so that kind of started this conversation and started the wheel spinning. In that conversation, the idea came up about, well, wait a minute. Why don’t we take the DP 400 and add the components to it to make it a chiller so that it can either support an air cold mode or make it support a liquid mode. As we started talking through the idea, your team loved the idea of having that flexibility. One of the things that is really unique about it and what we’re all seeing in the industry is we adapt to ai. Nobody today can tell you definitively, well, 20% of my load’s going to be air cooled, 80 percent’s going to be water cooled. And on day one, it may be, might be 90% air, 10% liquid. Day four, it might be 50 50. Day 20, it might be 10 90.
Raymond Hawkins:
The reality is nobody knows.
Dave Rubcich:
Nobody knows. And so as we started talking more and more about the idea of the cool face flex of a hybrid unit can operate in either mode of operation, everybody realized the true value of having this solution and the benefit of the flexibility. And so we literally took that idea back in, like I said, March, April timeframe, and we’re now, your team was down in Monterey, Mexico at our manufacturing plant just a few weeks ago testing the first unit coming off the production line. So we’re starting to ship that product. So from idea to final product was maybe about a nine month production or a development cycle, which without our partnership with Compass, we wouldn’t have been able to do.
Raymond Hawkins:
It’s a really cool, innovative collaborative, listen to the marketplace, pay attention solution. Somebody didn’t sit in a lab somewhere and say, I think I’d like to do this. Both of us listened to what was happening in the marketplace, listened to our customers and said, Hey, what do you think about this? I think it was a beautiful combination of market intelligence and collaboration to, to your point about the flexibility. I mean, I am out in front of customers routinely telling the story of, Hey, I know you want liquid cooling, and I know you can’t tell me how much, so don’t worry about it. I’m going to do this.
Dave Rubcich:
Yeah, I a hundred percent agree with you. It was true collaboration of us listening to what Compass’s needs were and Vertiv coming up with a concept and then us co-developing it together and we put a UPS in it to make sure that we can back up the pumps for that liquid cooling load. I mean, it’s got a lot of innovation into it. And again, probably the best thing, you didn’t have to change any of your building design.
Raymond Hawkins:
Well, and not only, it’s interesting you mentioned the UPS. It is a well thought out solution because when I sit down in the room with our engineers and my customer’s engineers, they start rattling off questions. And the team has anticipated so much about what was going to be asked, can I switch? How long does the switch? How am I going to keep the pumps up when I switch over if I’m on liquid? To the point, the UPS, there’s lots of industry knowledge built into that unit. It is very, very well thought out and innovative solution. Well, man, Dave, this has been awesome. I really, really have enjoyed getting to hear your personal story, getting to hear the Liebert to verus story. I think it would be remiss for two guys who both went school in Ohio to not end the podcast without a Woody Hayes story. I mean, so you got to have at least one. I mean, you’ve been in Ohio your whole life. You got to have one good Woody Hayes story,
Dave Rubcich:
The one that I can think of, and it’s a well-known one, but it’s, it’s probably always my favorite Woody quote was, they were beating the hell out of Michigan. I think he went for two, and they asked him at the end of the game why he went for two. And he said, because they wouldn’t allow me to go for
Raymond Hawkins:
Three’s. I
Dave Rubcich:
Always thought that summed up Woody.
Raymond Hawkins:
Yeah, yeah, that’s a good one. So I know I mentioned this one when we chatted beforehand, but I’m going to tell you, so Woody Hayes, I was in Ohio as my father was stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. So I was in the Dayton Fairborne area, and this is in my early days. So I would’ve been middle school through high school. I ended up moving before my senior year, but middle school through high school. So I’d have been, I don’t know, whatever that is, 11 through 15 or something like that. And we would go to the state fair. And I want to say the state fair was in Columbus every year. I’m not sure that’s right, but I think that’s right. And my father had bought me a t-shirt. So this would’ve been in the, as much as I hate to admit it in the seventies, and it said Woody Hayes, 278 wins, 42 losses, seven ties and one
Dave Rubcich:
Knockout. One knockout.
Raymond Hawkins:
And I wore that to the state fair, and I thought it was cute and funny, and I followed football, but you would’ve been amazed by how many grownups stopped me and asked to take a picture with me in that shirt. Oh, is that right? And that, so I just stood out as these memories as a kid at Anchor. I remembered what a big hit that t-shirt was at the state mayor one knockout.
Dave Rubcich:
And I still remember the play.
Raymond Hawkins:
Oh
Dave Rubcich:
My gosh. Watching at Clemson Bowl game. Yeah.
Raymond Hawkins:
Amen. Yeah. So for those of you listening to our podcast who aren’t crazy sports guys, YouTube, Woody Hayes punches a player, and you’ll know what Dave and I are talking about. It is worth the watch. We’ll just say, it’s a nice way to say it is that Woody was intense. That’s probably He was
Dave Rubcich:
Intense. Yeah,
Raymond Hawkins:
He was. That’s the best way.
Dave Rubcich:
Competitor,
Raymond Hawkins:
A competitive guy. Well, Dave, thank you so much for the partnership that you have. Thank you for such a creative and smart solution. Super impressed and love our friends at Vertiv. And thank you for hanging out with me a little bit and talking with the folks that want to listen and learn a little bit about the data center business. It’s been great.
Dave Rubcich:
I appreciate the opportunity. Enjoyed talking to you as well. So thank you so much.
Raymond Hawkins:
Awesome stuff. Thank you.