Case Study: Southeastern Orthopedic Center Cools Server Rooms And Keeps Systems Running With Tripp Lite

Customer
Based in Savannah, Georgia, Southeastern Orthopedic Center (SEO) provides full-service outpatient surgical care, including digital MRI and X-ray services, physical therapy and hand therapy at 25 satellite offices and three hospitals, where they also provide in-patient services. They offer subspecialty expertise in the areas of Sports Medicine, Joint Replacement, Spine & Neck, Trauma, Foot & Ankle, Hand & Wrist, Pediatric and Interventional Pain Management. Their 750 employees work with the goal of providing state-of-the-art care by maintaining quality standards at affordable costs.

Goal
Owing to the heat of southern Georgia, CIO Robert Snipes set out to provide cooling for small (10' x 10') server rooms, each of which house 2-3 servers and a number of network devices, routers and switches. "Without a cooling solution in place," he said, "the average temperature in the server rooms was 95 degrees, but would get up to 100 degrees or more. Network devices were constantly dropping due to the high temperatures."

Rather than absorbing the expense of running central air conditioning into the server rooms, Southeastern Orthopedic Center originally purchased upright cooling units from a Tripp Lite competitor, which proved not to be the right solution, due to condensation build-up. "The problem was water drainage," said Snipes. "It only took once for a water leak from the cooling unit to ruin electrical equipment."