SILENT-AIRE
THE FOUNDATIONS OF CLOUD COMPUTING
SILENT-AIRE
FOR 26 YEARS SILENT-AIR HAS BEEN DESIGNING, ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING HYPERSCALE COOLING AND MODULAR DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF CLOUD COMPUTING PROJECT MANAGED BY: ETHAN THOMPSON
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Silent-Aire is a company driven by technology in its quest to design, engineer, and manufacture hyperscale cooling and modular data centre solutions for a wide range of industries and clients. The company is a pioneer in the field, with their work encompassing CRAC, CRAHU & AHUs deployed at most of the largest hyperscale facilities built since cloud computing first emerged on the scene in 2004. Its custom data centre solutions for cloud service providers are the benchmark for innovation, energy efficiency, volume manufacturing and the complexity of rapid regional deployments which define hyperscale infrastructure.
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he company has also built itself a reputation as a world leader in the design, engineering, manufacturing and service of modular data centres, with a portfolio that includes Micro, Enterprise and Campus solutions which can solve the most challenging issues facing data centre infrastructure around the world. Silent-Aire’s MDC Vault is run by industry veterans widely experienced in engineered mechanical and electrical solutions and can
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“Customer relationships are based on the continuous exchange of information, innovation, and respect.” For over forty years, Comefri has produced fans which are internationally recognized for their quality and construction. The parent company of the group, Comefri S.p.A., was founded in 1972 in northeastern Italy, a region long known for its high-quality craftsmanship. Our steady growth has allowed the opening of production operations in Germany, U.S.A., China, and Turkey, becoming one of the few fan manufacturers, if not the only one, with production and product development on three continents. Comefri fans are highly efficient designs, with low noise and vibration, featuring the shortest lead times in the marketplace. The HVAC series offer a wide selection of standard plenum and housed fan designs, available in forward-curved, backward-curved and airfoil designs, as well as complete custom fabrications. Besides its HVAC products, Comefri offers a complete line of industrial fans, including standard high pressure blowers, heavyduty custom-engineered mechanical draft fans, and our newest line of high volume axials with rugged extruded aluminum blades. Fans play a crucial role in a number of industrial applications that require specific operating points to maintain optimal conditions. These are often large-scale or demanding processes with extreme working and ambient temperatures, such as heat exchange, dust/
fume extraction, and material conveyance. Comefri serves all major industry sectors, providing tailored solutions for HVAC, energy, transportation, oil and gas, marine, automotive, power generation, and other mission-critical applications. Comefri’s customers benefit from a wide range of accessories and options, including specialty materials such as stainless steel construction or hot-dip galvanized coatings, custom safety guards, spark-resistant construction with severe duty or explosion-proof motors, water-tight electrical connections, and much more. Comefri is certified to ISO 9001-2015 and 14001-2015 and ISO 45001-2018 standards. Our products are built according to ATEX, AMCA, ABS and DNV standards and we strive to meet or exceed compliance with worldwide low carbon footprint energy-saving directives. Our AMCA-accredited laboratories (one in the U.S.A. and one in Italy) allow customers to further optimize the performance of their products, and to test out new, clean ideas. Our customer relationships are based on innovation, respect and the continuous exchange of information. As a global team, our group is equipped with the assets and experience customers expect from a world-class organization. Comefri prides itself in being at the forefront of its field and invests in what’s to come. Every day more people get to know us in the world market, and thanks to the hard work of our dedicated and knowledgeable team members, we are prepared to discuss those opportunities and meet new challenges.
Visit us online and let’s see what we can build together: www.comefri.com - www.comefriusa.com - www.comefrichina.com - www.comefri.com.tr
SUPERIOR COOLING, EVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY Proudly based in Texas, Portacool has always called the small East Texas town of Center home. In less than 30 years, Portacool, LLC has emerged as the global leader in evaporative cooling technologies. The company boasts two brands – Portacool® portable evaporative coolers and Kuul® evaporative media. Six years after the company was founded, supply chain issues were plaguing the fledgling business relative to rigid evaporative media. After weeks of discussion, it was decided the company would try producing their own brand of evaporative media. Through months of trial and error, a product they were proud of was produced. By 1998 the company began putting their own evaporative media into Portacool evaporative coolers as well as successfully growing the business foothold in the agriculture industry. As a result, Portacool added more evaporative media production lines – a second and rapidly thereafter, the third and fourth lines. During peak seasons – early spring and summer – the evaporative media lines ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week and still could not keep up with the sharp increase in demand. In 2016, KÜÜL Pads underwent a rebrand and became today’s Kuul evaporative media. In addition to a new flashy logo, the company also began focusing on innovative research and development. This has led to the expansion of several series of products, all specifically engineered, designed and manufactured with different industries in mind. For example, the Kuul Vitality™ series is developed for the agriculture industry and designed with the strongest, longest-lasting materials on the market. The Kuul Control™ series is engineered to provide the lowest pressure drop and highest efficiency for the gas turbine and HVAC industries. Kuul Comfort™ evaporative media is made exclusively to meet the rigorous performance requirements of Portacool portable evaporative coolers. Kuul Evolution FirePro™, a UL900 rated product, is one of the few inorganic products on the market designed for the data center industry Kuul Evolution FirePro™ that powers today’s demand for data processing, internet and cloud connectivity. However, the evaporative media technological advancements within Kuul evaporative media do not stop there. The future of Kuul evaporative media is bright with many projects currently in development. New research is being conducted each day to determine how evaporative media can be more widely used in the world in which we live. All Kuul evaporative media is made with 100 percent USA-sourced materials. While the majority of Kuul evaporative media is proudly made in the USA, as the company has grown, global expansion has been necessary to best serve customers. In 2014, Portacool added an evaporative media manufacturing facility in Malaysia to exclusively serve the South East Asian markets with the same high-quality evaporative media with which the brand has become associated. Live Customer Service support is based in Center, Texas, United States and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. With a strong network of domestic and global distributors, Portacool, LLC continues to expand its worldwide market horizons while producing outstanding sales revenues from both brands – all from the setting of Center, Texas.
EXPERIENCE THE KUUL EFFECT WWW.THEKUULEFFECT.COM WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/COMPANY/PORT-A-COOL-LLC
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offer a fully integrated, turnkey solution that is manufactured at any of Silent-Aire’s 13 global, ETL/UI certified facilities. As well as designing and building these projects, Silent-Aire offers top of the line field services teams who factory trained and certified in deploying, servicing and maintaining Silent-Aire solutions for the hyperscale data centre industry. The company boasts regional service centres throughout North America and Europe, supporting customers across the lifecycle of SilentAire’s products. This isn’t a short-term commitment either. There are data centre facilities that have operated SilentAire products for 15 years and continue to be supported by the company.
THE SILENT-AIRE STORY
Silent-Aire’s roots go back beyond the dawn of the cloud computing age, however. At its roots, Silent-Aire was a company that manufactured
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and engineered bespoke HVAC solutions for hospitals, schools and recreational complexes, gradually growing into serving larger industrial HVAC deployments for the energy and mining sectors. Brothers Dan and Lindsey Leckelt took over the company from their parents in the year 2000 after graduating from the University of Alberta with Civil and Mechanical Engineering degrees. At first, the company continued its path of organic growth, eventually acquiring a new manufacturing facility in Edmonton. This acquisition would prove to be the catalyst that launched Silent-Aire into the data centre mission-critical HVAC business. Fast forward twelve years and Silent-Aire had built its second 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Edmonton, including four assembly lines and new office space for the business’s engineering and operations. Two years after that a third
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facility was built for additional capacity and redundancy in Phoenix, Arizona, mirroring the Edmonton facility. 2017 saw Silent-Aire arrive in Europe with the acquisition of Dublin-based firm RMI Engineering. Last year the company celebrated in 25th anniversary.
“OUR EMPLOYEES UNDERSTAND WHAT WE DESIGN, ENGINEER AND BUILD IS A CRITICAL PART OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY THAT GOVERNS DAILY LIFE.”
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For the last decade SilentAire has been growing through the business it has received from data centre customers that need mission-critical infrastructure for an everexpanding hyper-scale cloud. To deliver this, the company has relentlessly focused on its operations, quality and safety, including the certifications for ISO 9001, quality, ISO 14001, environment, and OHSAS 18001, safety. As Dan Leckelt as said, “Our employees understand what we design, engineer and build is a critical part of the infrastructure of the digital economy that governs daily life.”
CONTINUED EXPANSION
This year Silent-Aire’s journey has continued with the addition of a 105,000 square foot facility in Nisku, Alberta, alongside another 40,000 square foot facility in Edmonton. The new facility in Nisku is expected to create over 200 new skilled trade jobs, on top of the 200 new skill trade positions that will be created in the Edmonton area. “The Nisku facility is a key part of our plans to grow our capacity and team,” Dan Leckelt said of the expansion. This facility will provide office space for over 30 personnel as well as space for manufacturing teams will be operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week “Delivering data centre technologies and solutions to the world’s largest cloud service providers is complex and challenging,” stated Lindsey Leckelt when the facility was announced. “We recognise that expanding our infrastructure and capacity is vital to meeting our client’s most aggressive delivery schedules. The Edmonton region has some of the highest quality skilled
trades in the world and we are proud to create over 200 new careers at Silent-Aire.” As with all of SilentAire’s facilities, safety and environmental concerns are of paramount importance to the company’s co-CEOs. “Safety, quality, environmental sustainability and business continuity are part of our corporate culture, and having modern manufacturing facilities is integral to ensuring we can maintain global standards and processes. We strongly believe that if you want to be a leader in the data centre technology business, having consistent global standards at all facilities is critical,” Dan Leckelt said of the facility. Nisku is the perfect location for this new facility, with the Canadian hamlet transforming into a growing business and industrial hub covering 2,044 hectares. Over 6,000 workers and 400 businesses have made the hamlet their home, and Silent-Aire’s facility is situated right next to the new 1 million square foot Amazon fulfilment centre. Only five minutes from the Edmonton International Airport and 15 minutes from Edmonton’s downtown core, the facility is perfectly placed for manufacturing and distribution. “Silent-Aires expansion and new facility are a great example of the huge potential for growth in Nisku and the entire region. As a global leader in data centre technology, Silent-Aire is a critical employer in a diverse, fast-growing industry and showcases the bright future in store for our community” said Brad Rutherford, the Member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for Leduc-Beaumont. At the same time as this expansion in Edmonton SilentAire’s also expanding its
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“THE NISKU FACILITY IS A KEY PART OF OUR PLANS TO GROW OUR CAPACITY AND TEAM.” workforce around the world, with its team doubling to 2,100 people over the last couple of years. The company now enjoys over 750,000 square feet of manufacturing capacity across its twelve facilities around the world, with plans already in place to grow infrastructure and create even more opportunities for current and future employees. As Lindsey Leckelt has pointed out, “The expansion of our global engineering and manufacturing teams are the backbone of our Corporate Mission to ‘Deliver Innovative Solutions’. These growth initiatives demonstrate our commitment to our clients and the entire Silent-Aire team.”
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