RTKL is one of the largest architectural/engineering firms in the world. It is an international, multidisciplinary design services practice headquartered in Baltimore,with offices located everywhere from Los Angeles to Madrid to Tokyo. Over 900 professionals work for the company on a variety of different applications.

One of the areas that RTKL specializes in is data center design. When two RTKL employees in Baltimore started seeing the densities of computer equipment in data centers appear to outstrip the ability of the conventional design to cool the equipment, they began thinking of better ways to keep the equipment cool.