Technology
The technology behind NICPL data centers
Every NICPL site — campus or containerized — is built on the same underlying direction: cooling matched to rack density, power designed for renewable-first resilience, and monitoring that treats every site as part of one network, all certified to the same Tier 3, TIA-942 standard. This page covers where that direction comes from; see TIA-942 vs Uptime for how our certification compares, or the FAQs for quick answers.
Our technology direction
Rather than a single fixed design repeated everywhere, NICPL provisions technology to match what a site actually needs — then holds every site to the same standard regardless of scale. Rack density is zoned per hall rather than fixed facility-wide, from air-cooled 5kW racks to hybrid-cooled 135kW racks, so density gets built where the demand is instead of over-building for a worst case.
Cooling across every design — campus or containerized — is air-cooled or closed-loop liquid-cooled only: no evaporative towers, no water-based heat rejection, so cooling consumes zero process water at any density, on any site. That shows up directly in Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE): evaporative-cooled facilities average around 1.9 L/kWh, while NICPL's zero-evaporative design targets below 0.05 L/kWh — see Campus Design for the full comparison. Power is built to the same rigor a TIA-942 Rated-3 design demands at every scale, and renewable supply is designed in from Day 1, not retrofitted later. Halls are also built to OCP Ready™ v1 Data Center Site criteria, so open, vendor-neutral rack and hardware designs — including GPU-dense AI configurations — drop in without facility rework. And every building, not just the data hall, targets IGBC Gold certification or better.
None of that is worth much without knowing it's actually holding — so every hall runs a hardwired IIoT sensor layer covering temperature, humidity, differential pressure, airflow, water leaks, vibration, door access, and air quality, feeding straight into the same unified DCIM + EMS platform rather than a patchwork of disconnected point tools. See Campus Design for the full sensor breakdown.
That direction plays out differently depending on what a site needs to do: a large, phased campus platform for sustained regional capacity, or a factory-built containerized unit for compute that needs to be live in weeks. Both are detailed below.
Two designs, one standard
5MW/20MW Campus Design
The primary platform: a standardized 5MW block that scales in place to a 20MW Tier-3 campus — cooling zoned by rack density, grid-tie power built to TIA-942 rigor, and unified monitoring across every site.
Explore the campus design →Containerized Edge Data Centers
The fast, small-footprint line: factory-built 20ft/40ft units, including the 20ft/60kW instant-edge configuration, for sites that need compute in weeks rather than a full campus build.
Explore the containerized design →Technical Glossary
Cooling
- Air-cooled racks
- Standard rack cooling via facility CRAC/CRAH air handling — the base technology for the 5kW–25kW density band.
- In-row RDHx (Rear-Door Heat Exchanger)
- A cooling coil mounted on the rear of the rack that removes heat from exhaust air in place, extending air-cooling headroom toward the top of the 5kW–25kW band without a room-level chilled-water retrofit.
- Zero water-wastage cooling
- NICPL cooling design deliberately excludes evaporative towers and other water-based heat rejection — air-cooled and closed-loop liquid cooling across every density band, so no process water is consumed or wasted for cooling at any site.
- Free cooling
- Using favourable outside air conditions to reject heat without running compressors — an air-side technique, consistent with NICPL's zero water-wastage cooling design.
- Hot-aisle containment
- Physically separating hot exhaust air from cold supply air to raise cooling efficiency.
- Hybrid cooling
- Cooling technology matched to rack density on a per-requirement basis across the 25kW–135kW band — direct-to-chip, liquid, or immersion, selected for the workload rather than one-size-fits-all.
- Direct-to-chip cooling
- Coolant delivered directly to a cold plate mounted on the processor or accelerator, removing heat at the source for the highest-density compute in the 25kW–135kW band.
- Liquid cooling
- Closed-loop liquid delivered to a cooling distribution unit (CDU) at the rack, used across the 25kW–135kW hybrid-cooling band alongside direct-to-chip and immersion options.
- Immersion cooling
- Full or partial submersion of IT hardware in a dielectric fluid; provisioned for Built-to-Suit deployments at the top of the 135kW density range.
- PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)
- Ratio of total facility power to IT equipment power — the industry's core efficiency metric.
- WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness)
- Liters of water consumed per kWh of IT energy delivered, counting only water that leaves the site via evaporation or discharge. Industry average sits near 1.9 L/kWh; zero-evaporative designs like NICPL's target below 0.05 L/kWh.
Power & Electrical
- N+1 redundancy
- One more unit than the minimum needed, so a single failure doesn't interrupt service.
- Concurrently maintainable
- Infrastructure that can be maintained or repaired without shutting down IT operations.
- BESS (Battery Energy Storage System)
- Battery buffer smoothing renewable/grid supply and riding through short outages.
- Captive solar
- On-site or dedicated solar generation feeding the DC directly rather than drawing purely from the grid.
- DG (diesel generator) backup
- Last-resort backup power behind UPS/BESS, sized for extended grid outages.
- Day-1 renewable integration
- Designing renewable supply into the facility from initial commissioning, not retrofitted later.
- ATS (Automatic Transfer Switch)
- Seamlessly switches the power path to a backup source (battery/DG) on grid failure, without interrupting supply.
- LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) battery
- The battery chemistry used for hours-scale autonomous backup in NICPL's containerized-DC modules.
- On-site substation / grid tie-in
- A dedicated substation at each site that interconnects to the utility grid directly, rather than relying on a shared upstream service transformer — the deployment standard NICPL builds every site to.
- GIS (Gas Insulated Switchgear)
- Compact, sealed switchgear used at the on-site substation in place of older air-insulated designs — a smaller footprint with built-in smart automation.
- TVP (Transient Voltage Protection) transformer
- A transformer engineered to absorb grid-side surges and switching transients before they reach IT load.
- SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition)
- Real-time digital monitoring and control across the power path, from the substation down to the rack — not just after-the-fact metering.
- STATCOM (Static Synchronous Compensator)
- Power-electronics equipment that stabilises voltage and power factor in real time, keeping power quality within tolerance under variable renewable and IT load.
- Harmonic filters
- Equipment that removes electrical harmonics generated by switching and IT load, protecting both the site and the upstream grid from power-quality issues.
Building & Civil
- Built-up area
- Total constructed floor area of the facility.
- 5MW modular block
- The repeatable construction unit; four blocks make one 20MW site.
- Mixed rack density zoning
- Provisioning different areas of the same facility for the 5kW–25kW air-cooled band and the 25kW–135kW hybrid-cooling band on demand, avoiding stranded capacity.
- Civil / seismic variability
- How local soil capacity, seismic zone, and flood/groundwater conditions drive foundation and structural design per site.
- ISO container / containerized DC
- A 20ft or 40ft standard shipping-container form factor, factory-integrated with power, cooling, and IT before site delivery — used for rapid or space-constrained deployments.
- FAT (Factory Acceptance Testing)
- Witnessed testing of a fully assembled unit before it leaves the factory, verifying power, cooling, monitoring, fire, and security all perform to spec ahead of site delivery.
- Sealed cable & pipe entry
- Mechanical sealing at every cable and pipe penetration — the same barrier used for fire and water protection also closes off the entry points pests and rodents exploit.
- IPM (Integrated Pest Management)
- A pest-control approach that leads with inspection, monitoring, and sanitation, treating pesticide application as a last resort rather than a routine.
- MMR (Meet-Me Room)
- A neutral interconnection space where carriers and network providers physically cross-connect — standard on every NICPL site for telco and CDN customers.
Monitoring & Automation
- IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) sensor
- A hardwired, network-connected sensor feeding environmental and equipment data straight into the facility monitoring platform — chosen over wireless for reliability, since there is no battery-replacement cycle or RF interference to manage in a mission-critical hall.
- Environmental monitoring
- Continuous, hardwired sensing of temperature, humidity, differential pressure, airflow, water leaks, vibration, door/access status, and air quality — at rack-level density, not room-level averages.
- Differential pressure monitoring
- Measuring pressure differences across aisle containment and underfloor plenum zones to catch air leaks before they show up as a hot spot.
- DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management)
- The unified software platform that brings rack power, environmental sensor data, UPS/battery health, and cooling/fire status together in one place — the alternative to a patchwork of disconnected point tools.
Certification
- TIA-942 Rated-3
- An open, ANSI-published data-center standard with third-party accredited certification, owned by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) — not affiliated with NICPL. See the full TIA-942 vs Uptime comparison for detail.
- Uptime Institute Tier III
- A proprietary methodology owned and certified directly by Uptime Institute, LLC — not affiliated with NICPL. See the full TIA-942 vs Uptime comparison for detail.
- Tier-3 certified facility vs. Tier-3 design
- Constructed-facility certification verifies what was actually built, not just what was planned.
- OCP Ready™ v1 Data Center Site
- An Open Compute Project Foundation facility-readiness designation, assessed against a published requirements matrix covering data center access, IT technical space, electrical systems, cooling, and telecom cabling — confirming a facility supports open, vendor-neutral Open Rack deployments without rework. OCP Ready™ is a trademark of the Open Compute Project Foundation, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, NICPL.
- IGBC Gold (or better)
- Every NICPL building targets certification from the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) at Gold level or higher — sustainable site planning, energy and water efficiency, and material selection assessed against a national green-building standard. IGBC is a registered trademark of the Indian Green Building Council / CII, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, NICPL.
- MeitY empanelment
- Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, data center empanelment — the eligibility track for government and PSU workloads under India's data-localisation framework. MeitY is a government body, not affiliated with NICPL.
- ISO/IEC 27001
- Information Security Management System (ISMS) certification — the baseline standard for how information security risk is managed, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is not affiliated with NICPL.
- ISO/IEC 27017
- Code of practice for information security controls specific to cloud and colocation services, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is not affiliated with NICPL.
- ISO/IEC 27018
- Code of practice for protecting personally identifiable information (PII) in a cloud/colocation environment, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is not affiliated with NICPL.
- ISO/IEC 20000
- IT Service Management (ITSM) standard, covering how IT services — including colocation operations — are delivered and supported, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is not affiliated with NICPL.