More CRAC units and rear door heat exchangers don’t solve a rising heat load. They just spread the problem across more equipment.
Every mechanical engineer sizing a new data hall runs into the same wall: GPU racks don’t put out a fixed heat load anymore, and the tools built for a stable, predictable room don’t know what to do with that.
The default response is to add more equipment to the fight — another CRAC unit here, a rear door heat exchanger there, a hot aisle containment structure wrapped around it all. Each addition needs its own CFD analysis to prove it won’t just create a new hot spot somewhere else in the room. And each one adds construction cost to a project that’s already fighting a compressed timeline.
None of it changes the actual problem. The heat load is variable, and the room is being asked to absorb that variability.
Tim Boyd, a DDC Solutions account executive who spent 28 years designing mechanical systems for mission-critical buildings, sees the same conversation on repeat: engineers trying to manage a moving target with tools built for a fixed one. The fix isn’t a better way to model the heat inside the room — it’s removing the variable heat load from the room’s design problem entirely. Rack containment does that by capturing heat at the rack and exporting it directly to a chiller through basic chilled water piping, before it ever becomes the room’s problem to solve.
What’s left is a data hall an engineer can design the simple way: block load, people load, basic ventilation. No CFD modeling for a load that’s already been removed from the equation, and no guessing how the next GPU refresh changes the airflow math.
It also changes what operators can do with the floor. When heat is captured and managed at the rack instead of the room, you’re no longer sequencing where high-density racks can go based on how the air moves around them. Any rack, any location, any time the GPUs ramp up or down — the containment unit handles it independently, without the room needing to change.
That’s the idea behind DDC’s tagline: any density, any scale, anywhere. Not because the heat problem went away, but because it stopped being the room’s problem to chase.
Who’s Speaking
Tim Boyd, Senior Account Executive, DDC Solutions — 28 years of mechanical engineering experience designing mission-critical buildings, including data centers.
Any density, any scale, anywhere.
Our previous episode: Your Spec Sheet Won’t Win the Budget Meeting
