nVent (NYSE: NVT)
Offering Dynamic and Futureready Data Center Solutions

nVent (NYSE: NVT) is a $2B+ global high performance electrical company with more than 9,500 employees at more than 130 sites globally. The world’s infrastructure is becoming more electric, driven by advances in technology and the need for more sustainable solutions. With its mission to connect and protect, nVent is well positioned to provide innovative solutions as the world continues to electrify.

nVent believes that safer systems ensure a more secure world. It connects and protects its customers with inventive electrical solutions from its portfolio of leading electrical product brands—nVent CADDY, ERICO, HOFFMAN, RAYCHEM, SCHROFF and TRACER.

nVent's global portfolio provides mission critical solutions that help customers reduce labor costs, reduce cost of ownership, increase productivity and avoid high cost of failure in a wide variety of industries including industrial, infrastructure, energy and commercial and residential. Included in nVent’s portfolio are robust, scalable data center solutions that connect, protect, power and cool mission critical IT equipment deployed in high performance computing, data storage and communications infrastructure. nVent’s data center solutions portfolio includes standard, modified and customized server cabinets, edge computing enclosures, rack power distribution, rack/row level cooling (air and liquid), cable support and pathway, monitoring and sensors.

Following is the conversation that CIO Applications Magazine had with Marc Caiola, the Sr. Director, Data Center and Networking Solutions (DNS) at nVent, to understand the company's products deployed in both centralized (enterprise, multi-tenant, cloud, hyperscale data centers) and decentralized (e.g., edge and on-premise) infrastructure segments.

What are the challenges that CIOs of leading companies face today in the Data Center space? How is nVent effectively addressing these issues?

Increasing heat densities resulting from new generation CPU and GPU architectures for highly complex data center and edge computing equipment is driving the need for localized (close-to-heat-source) high-density cooling solutions. Content streaming, High-Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), telemedicine and low latency 5G connectivity are just a few examples of applications fueling data processing and traffic demand in data centers worldwide.

Consequently, maintaining high availability (uptime) at minimal operational costs remains a major challenge in today’s data centers. A significant portion of data center budgets are often allocated towards energy consumption for IT equipment and server cooling.

At nVent, we often reference a rule-of-thumb that estimates an up to 50 percent reduction in the lifetime of electronics (e.g., IT equipment) for every 10 degrees Celsius, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit, that temperature rises over the optimum operating temperature. We also believe that liquid cooling has the potential to reduce energy costs by 30 percent or more when compared to traditional air cooling solutions. We have been providing liquid cooling solutions to data center customers for more than 15 years. During that time, we have learned that data center operators have unique cooling infrastructure requirements and challenges.

nVent offers a comprehensive range of standard and customized rack/row level air, indirect and direct liquid cooling solutions to meet these challenges, whether for harsh environments (e.g., Edge computing, 5G), smaller decentralized or large data center installations. Accordingly, our offering includes a wide range of air, air-to-liquid and high-density liquid cooling solutions that deliver direct and indirect cooling at the server (e.g., direct-to-chip), rack or row level.

In addition to our broad product offering, nVent offers a consultative customer experience, which extends to our customers the benefit of our proven expertise and core competencies in liquid cooling.

Please walk us through nVent’s mission to connect and protect customers with inventive electrical solutions.

At nVent, we believe that safer systems ensure a more secure world. We connect and protect our customers with inventive electrical solutions. The nVent name reflects the collective legacy of its trusted brands, which have helped set the global standard for innovative electrical components and systems for more than a century.

We work closely with our customers with the primary objective to serve best-in-class solutions that meet their current and future needs. We add value beyond just our products to creatively resolve customer challenges through our experience, core competencies, supply chain management and collaborative approach.

Please cite a case study where nVent has enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes.

One of our Hyperscaler customers needed help developing a rack level high-density liquid cooling solution to manage high heat loads in liquid cooled servers. Our customer provided a list of key requirements, which included stringent performance and quality requirements. Our engineering team worked closely with our customer’s implementation team to develop and manufacture high-density liquid Coolant Distribution Units and a liquid distribution manifold solution for deployment in multiple data centers with high-performance computing equipment.

We kicked off a two year development program which commenced production prior to 2019, and we continue to manufacture and deliver hundreds of CDUs and manifolds on an annual basis.

What separates nVent from the other players in the data center space?

We work closely with our customers with our primary objective being to serve best-in-class solutions that meet current and future needs. We are also committed to continuously investing in the development of innovative standard and custom products to meet the needs and requirements of our customers.

As previously discussed, we always bring our knowledge and experience to the table when seeking to help our customers overcome their unique challenges. When serving complex, large-scale programs, we assign dedicated program managers, supply chain management and design teams to support our customers through all stages of the implementation process: concept, specification, design, manufacturing, quality control and performance testing.

We have also established development partnerships with best-in-class solution providers that enhance our offering and ability to serve our customers by providing the most effective and reliable solutions that meet their needs.

What does the future hold for nVent?

We believe liquid cooling is the future and are committed to being a leading innovator and provider in this rapidly emerging segment. Our established and comprehensive, and complementary portfolio of products covers nearly all necessary rack and row level product categories within the data center, including server racks, PDUs, monitoring, cable support and pathways, leak detection and more.

Further, we are excited about our recent acquisition of CIS Global, which significantly enhances our rack power distribution, monitoring and sensor portfolio. From a new product introduction perspective, we are in the process of expanding our liquid cooling portfolio with standalone Liquid-to-Air (LTA) cooling solutions for data centers that are not equipped with the necessary facility infrastructure to provide liquid cooling to the room and rack level. We consider this type of solution to be a gateway (intermediary) step for data center operators with facilities lacking the necessary physical infrastructure (e.g.,cooling tower, chiller, fluid distribution networks) and/or customers that are not fully prepared to implement the large-scale deployment of liquid cooling. We are excited by the initial response and high level of interest garnered from multiple customers, small and large.