Maxi-Cool Gemini 2021: A new product for a changing landscape in data capture

Increasingly, data collection and performance analysis of both people and equipment has meant that server cabinets have become standard equipment for sports teams at home and on the road.  Where the aim is achieving a competitive edge, the role of data in this process is now indisputable.

In the last 50 years, data capture in sports to monitor the performance of individuals and equipment has become routine and ubiquitous.  While the root of data analysis in American sports and Baseball specifically, is historically traceable to 1858 and Henry Chadwick’s invention of the Box Score system, progress in the use of data in sport has been rapid and comprehensive. Frustration with the limitations of the batting average as a measure of team performance with Baseball in 1971 saw the creation of the Society of American Baseball Research and SABeRmetrics was born.  A story of the impact of this development on a team was encapsulated in the film Moneyball (2011) where the league topping successes of the Oakland Athletics team under manager Billy Bean in 2002 is driven by the analysis of the data collected on the players.

Data in Sports Performance: Why is it important?

Since then, the frequency and scale of data collection have developed rapidly both within and beyond Baseball and nowadays, data is used in all sports in three main ways:  to monitor individual performance; to support and maintain the equipment used, and to monitor the competitions and arenas. Real-time data is collected during training and matches through wearable technology worn by individuals and used in real-time for substitutions and other tactical coaching decisions and fed back to data capture servers within team enclosures.  The data on players has become a crucial aspect of recruitment strategies, performance analysis, injury prevention, injury rehabilitation and transfer policies in most sports.

Similarly, all the equipment used by individuals in competition is monitored by sensors and the data is fed back to the team compounds for real-time analysis and response and stored for future performance analysis.  This is as important in some sports as the performance of the individual athlete. For example, sophisticated teams with complex machines, F1 teams, generate huge amounts of data in real-time in the pitlane during warmups, qualifying and racing by monitoring all aspects of equipment and the individual drivers. The data generated provides for a quick response to mechanical problems that could make a big difference on race day.

Data is generated by sporting arenas, pitches and courts of all descriptions to support match days and sporting events.  This is collected to make structural assessments and improvements to grounds and the accuracy of the sensors and cameras informing the data have revolutionised refereeing. Giving the technology the ‘last word’ as demonstrated by Hawke Eye at Wimbledon, the VAR in football and TMO in rugby.   

Data capture in sports is essential to the future of teams who are, in the words of Sir David Brailsford, looking for ‘marginal gains’ and given the fast pace of technological and software developments, the volume and scale of data generated is potentially infinite. Data also supports the commercial and merchandising interests of sport through virtual games, fantasy football leagues, and even gambling. The updated versions depend on the updated data sets of individuals.

All the data collected in real-time in sports is sent to local servers acting as a conduit for cloud storage.  The volume of the data and the necessary use of it in real-time, to make a substitution or to change a part, for example, necessitates servers and therefore server racks.  Server racks need proper cooling to function properly and deliver data as fast as possible when it is needed.  At Maxi-Cool we have developed a high-specification server rack cooling system to take on the road with a starting capacity of 5kW.   Maxi-Cool Gemini provides the certainty of fully functioning servers in properly cooled cabinets for data capture on the move.