Mountain Gear Adopts SprayCool Solution

Outdoor products retailer Mountain Gear has become the first company to take advantage of an incentive program from Avista Utilities offering rebates of up to $5,000 per rack for using SprayCool's chip-level liquid cooling solution. Mountain Gear will install SprayCool Enhanced Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers in its data center within the next two months, and may may add SprayCool solutions to its IBM servers already in production, the company said today.

SprayCool's system uses a liquid to cool electronics and capture heat at the chip level before it reaches the air in the room. SprayCool sprays a mist of a liquid called Fluorinert directly onto chip components via a closed-loop system of hoses connected to a thermal management unit at the base of the rack. SprayCool says its approach can reduce total cooling power consumption by 40 percent in most data centers.

Mountain Gear is implementing SprayCool as part of a data center expansion. "As a growing company, we searched for solutions that would not only allow us to add more electronics to our limited space, but also do so in a responsible manner," said Paul Fish, president of Mountain Gear. "SprayCool's products were a perfect fit. By installing the company's liquid-cooling technology, we hope to serve as an example of how e-commerce companies can easily reduce their environmental footprint."

Mountain Gear just moved its headquarters to a 160,000-square-foot building in Spokane Valley, and is working on a LEED Certification of the remodel project. SprayCool announced Mountain Gear as a new customer today at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit, which is being held today through Wednesday in Orlando, Fla.

Avista, a Spokane-based electric and natural gas utility, launched its rebate program last year after evaluating SprayCool's products. Mountain Gear is the first company to participate, and will receive up to a $5,000 rebate for each fully loaded SprayCool M-Series server rack. "Waste heat collected from SprayCool's innovative technology may now be transferred to a system or device that needs it, providing even greater energy efficiency," said Bruce Folsom, senior manager of demand side management at Avista Utilities.

SprayCool was founded in 1988 as Isothermal Systems Research, and has focused on applications for the U.S. Department of Defense, including Silent Server for intelligence applications. In 1999 the DoD began using SprayCool's technology in a 5.5kW super computer and the Marine Corp's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.