Positioning itself as the ultimate data center, Herakles Data of Sacramento, California, offers uninterruptible power, improved cooling and redundant internet bandwidth to its co-location customers seeking to outsource their primary or disaster recovery IT infrastructure. At a colocation data center, corporations rent specific spaces to operate their data servers, along with the servers of other companies, in a common physical location.

With all the critical servers housed in the facility generating heat, cooling is critical for the data center. "Cooling is essential to our business, in fact it's the number two essential factor after uninterrupted power for our customers," said Laurence Stancil, director of facilities at Herakles Data.

Herakles Data President and CEO Lou Kirchner stresses how essential cooling is to their success. "We've had customers come to us after leaving a previous data center because cooling was inadequate or unreliable," Kirchner said. "And with the newer servers being more powerful and more compact than ever, they produce even more heat. With our facility near 100% capacity, it's critical that our cooling capacity be able to handle the heat of the newest generation of servers."

Earlier this year Herakles Data realized that its rapid business growth meant that it had outgrown the capacity of its existing four air-cooled Daikin chillers. It now needed additional capacity that could meet the demands of its mission-critical interior space and ambient temperatures that typically reach 95 degrees during the summer. "Under California's Title 24 standards, we couldn't add a fifth chiller to meet our growing capacity needs, so we had to consider alternatives outside the box," said Stancil. "Our number one requirement in selecting a new system was speed. The new cooling system had to be installed and operating as fast as possible, with minimal interruption to our cooling requirements."

In addition to Gamewell Mechanical, Bledsoe credits the helicopter provider and the trucking company as all going above and beyond to ensure the job was successful and met the tight delivery window. "All 17 rooftop units were set in place within 90 minutes," Bledsoe said. To complete the project, in August 2014, Daikin Applied will also provide 9 rooftop air handling units to a small facility at the ZF Transmissions campus.

Working with representatives from Norman Wright Mechanical Equipment Corporation, the Daikin representative in Sacramento, the facility team from Herakles Data evaluated alternative solutions and selected Daikin Modular Central Plants. Modular central plants are pre-engineered and pre-assembled from one supplier with the chiller, pumps, cooling tower and interconnected piping, and then shipped to the job site for final assembly. Their unique modular configuration reduces site assembly time compared to traditional "site built" cooling plants with the chiller, cooling tower, pumps and piping all coming from separate sources.

"We were comfortable going with Daikin again because we've had five years of excellent, reliable support from Daikin Service," Kirchner said.

Although he was also comfortable with Daikin, Stancil was initially skeptical of the modular central plant concept but the installation process made him a believer. "Our first four Modular Central Plants were dropped, bolted and wired – fully assembled – in a week. I'd compare it to changing a propeller in flight," Stancil said. "You have to get it right the first time. And we did. Final site assembly was a very clean process – fast, easy and efficient."

It was so fast and easy that Stancil now prefers the modular central plant concept to the traditional site-built central cooling plant. "I would never do it the old way again," he said.

Kirchner was especially pleased that the one-week installation process resulted in zero downtime for the data center saying, "It was seamless for our customers."