Mauritius Union Assurance (MUA) is the largest insurance company in Mauritius. It is part of the Mauritius Union Group which operates within the financial services sector, specialising in insurance, corporate pension schemes, investment and loans for both individuals and companies. They have been in existence since 1948.

In 2013, Inspexa was commissioned by MUA to review their computer room air-conditioning system to ensure it could sustain the business’ rapidly growing data requirements. MUA wanted to have a clear insight into the actual and future risks associated with the existing cooling system and also to address some issues they were experiencing in the computer room.

The computer room was being cooled with normal direct expansion units working in duty and standby, without any precision control on the environmental conditions. At first glance, we suspected poor air distribution and excessive electricity consumption because of the air-distribution configuration.

To confirm this observation, we modelled the actual room air-distribution system using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The CFD model helped us to better understand air movement inside the computer room and the effect of the heat dissipated there, with the indoor unit fans blowing. We could identify the exact cause of hot spots and the excessive use of energy from hot and cold air being mixed. We used CFD models to determine the best cooling configuration from better positioning new computer room air-conditioning units and configuring the hot and cold aisles. Several options were proposed to the client, along with life cycle-costs estimates, so that MUA could make decisions on remedies it might wish to introduce.

We also identified several other risks and proposed a series of comprehensive solutions to the problems. As a mark of MUA’s satisfaction with our initial work, they subsequently gave us the contract to design and manage the upgrading of their computer room.