Silent-Aire: Trusted Partner of the World's Largest Data Centers

Lindsey Leckelt, Co-CEOs

Business continuity has remained a constant focus for businesses and is no different for the industrial, institutional, and data center markets. Offering this ability with high quality innovative modular data center solutions, Silent-Aire provides the infrastructure solutions for the world’s leading hyperscale data center providers. With over 24 years of experience, and three world-class manufacturing hubs totaling over 600,000 sq. ft, spread over Canada, the U.S., and Ireland the business is well positioned for growth. Silent-Aire markets include mission-critical, industrial, institutional, and maintenance services. Dan Leckelt and Lindsey Leckelt, Co-CEOs of Silent-Aire, elaborate on the organization’s journey in becoming a leader in data center engineering, and manufacturing through supporting their clients to achieve their goals.

Could you elaborate on the trends, challenges in the data center landscape, and how are you addressing them effectively?

The data center landscape is still driven by technologies that deliver and support energy savings and efficiencies of all equipment. What makes us unique is being able to deliver these technologies in a rapidly changing environment with demanding schedule constraints all while maintaining the highest quality standards at a competitive price.

With most of our clients being hyperscale, cloud-based companies we are seeing the trend towards more modular builds. The data center industry is growing at such a fast pace that organizations need to have a combination of both brick-and-mortar and modular data centers and we are leaders in both offerings. We believe that we enable businesses who are deploying hyperscale data centers to productively model both these design types into their mission critical infrastructure.

We are also seeing private cloud growing with the deployment of modular segments. These are preferred by businesses which want to adopt the cloud, and still maintain on premise infrastructure in a Hybrid IT model.

Could you elaborate on your offerings and the benefits clients can reap out of them?

In regards to our modular data center products, our strength as a business is our ability to design and deliver the exact requirements of the specific customer. The success in our modular data center business lies in us customizing the product for our clients based on their specific site requirements, whereas most of our competitors are promoting standardized catalogue units that offer very little customization.

We are deploying a combination of cooling solutions within our modular data centers, and they are all application and site specific. For example, in regions where we are not able to use water for direct evaporative cooling, we are using airside economizer with refrigerant knockdown cooling. We design the cooling and power systems to create different levels of redundancy within our equipment and maintain uptime and serviceability.

What is your approach to on boarding your clients?

How we onboard our clients is driven primarily through our engineering and project management team strength.

With our global manufacturing presence and multiple supply chain resources, we are able to provide our customers the ability to grow at high speed with quick asset velocity

We first understand the desired outcomes of our clients and then develop solutions for them. Our experienced engineering group has been supporting the hyperscale industry for over 12 years and we have the ability to design, prototype and then manufacture large batches of equipment, in a high-quality manner which gives us a competitive edge. We have dedicated project management teams that work with the clients on the delivery and installation, which flow through to our commissioning teams. Having grown our mission-critical services team, which has doubled in size in the past year, we make sure that our clients are getting equipment that is properly commissioned and that we support them with any of the outstanding warranty items or any issues.

What are the differentiating factors that allow Silent-Aire to stay ahead of market competitors?

There is a large surge in the industry for modular data center infrastructure, and there are not a lot of people who do it successfully, but we have managed to gain a strong foothold in the market. Our strength lies in our ability to design and develop mission critical infrastructure that is specific to each customer. We can deliver all client requirements and meet deadlines without compromising quality. In our business you can’t miss deadlines and we strive to maintain our reputation as a company that can be trusted and relied on.

Dan Leckelt, Co-CEOs

Often, we do the turnkey design of an entire project, working early and at all stages with the end-users and the facility operators. Our deep understanding of our clients, the ability to deliver their requirements on time, and efforts to provide value beyond our scope to address their needs has enabled us to have years of long relationships with our customers. We have currently undertaken several deployments under extreme time constraints that we were able to deliver successfully.

As a vertically integrated company, we do not outsource our manufacturing capabilities; and we work closely with our supply chain to ensure we have the materials and components when we need them. All the engineering and manufacturing knowledge base is ingrained and shared across all our locations globally. This is a unique differentiator that keeps us on the leading edge.

We develop solutions for our high-end partners such that they rely on us to keep them on the cutting-edge of what’s new and what's most efficient. Maintaining our agility during our aggressive business growth is a core competency that is ingrained in our business.

What is the envisioned future of Silent-Aire?

Our focus has remained on the hyperscale and mission critical data center business where we provide customized client centric solutions. We have succeeded around the custom design and engineering side of our business, and we have grown organically at the pace required to support our customers as they have expanded around the world. With our global manufacturing presence and multiple supply chain resources, we can provide them with the ability to grow at high speed and create asset velocity. Our redundancy in our global footprint gives us the ability to manufacture our products at any of our factories so we can cater to the ever-evolving aggressive demands of our customers.

We will always be customer-centric. In the hyperscale market, customers need partners that can grow with them globally, and we dedicate and devote ourselves and our business to be reliable and meet those needs. We will continue that growth pattern. We will continue to expand as we did last year with our European acquisition of R.M.I Engineering Ltd of Dublin; combined with our organic growth in North America our future remains very positive. We are now targeting the Asia-Pacific region and are working on how we service the Middle East and southern parts of Africa. Our growth strategy is aggressive, and we will plan on keeping it that way as we expand our market share with our customers which we partner and collaborate with on a daily basis.