STULZ Brand Guidelines: The 1947 Hamburg Appliance Firm That Turned to Data-Centre Cooling

A Hamburg appliance maker and its Piccolo.

STULZ dates its beginning to 1947 in Hamburg. The company names Albert Stulz as its founder and says the business was first called Electro AS GmbH Hamburg; German Wikipedia gives the 1947 firm as the Albert Stulz Fabrik elektrotechnischer Geräte, a factory for electrical appliances. Its first product, according to the company’s history page, was the Piccolo, a household machine that worked as a vacuum cleaner, a floor polisher and a food processor, sold with the slogan “Piccolo helps the housewife.”

The group soon spread beyond appliances. In 1959 a plastics-processing sister company, Montaplast, was founded; German Wikipedia describes it today as a global supplier of plastic parts to the car industry, and says that plastic components for carmakers, rather than air conditioning, are the group’s main source of sales. The climate business began in 1965, when, according to both German Wikipedia and the company, STULZ launched the first air-conditioning unit of its own make, a comfort unit that cooled rooms and took moisture out of the air. German Wikipedia adds that since 1969 STULZ has also been the exclusive German distributor of air-conditioning systems from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

The turn to computers came in the next decade. The company ties it to the arrival of large mainframe systems around 1970 and says that, as the computer-centre trade grew in the 1970s, it was already supplying air conditioning and direct water cooling for mainframes; German Wikipedia dates its specialisation in air conditioning for computer centres to 1971. German Wikipedia describes this kind of equipment, precision air conditioning, as units that hold temperature and humidity at the exact values a room’s equipment needs, matched to each installation.

From mainframe rooms to CyberAir.

In 1977, the company says, STULZ brought out modular precision air-conditioning systems, a design it credits with building its international name among data-centre operators and, later, mobile-phone network stations. Through the 1980s and 1990s, as computer rooms were built with raised floors, it made units that circulated air through the space beneath them, and it began to develop what it calls Free Cooling, which draws on cool outdoor conditions; its 2022 sustainability report says such units suit cold and temperate climates in particular.

The range it names most often is CyberAir. The company says the CyberAir 1 of 2003 was the first precision air-conditioning unit in the world fitted with EC fans as standard, and its 2022 sustainability report calls the CyberAir series one of its flagships. The range has since widened to chillers, air-handling units, side coolers, units for indoor installation and containerised systems. The same report lists micro data centres and direct-chip cooling for IT equipment, alongside cooling for medical technology, telecommunications and industry, and says the company also sells and services comfort air conditioners and humidifiers, including water treatment for humidification. German Wikipedia adds that STULZ keeps a worldwide service organisation to maintain the units it installs.

STULZ has also moved into building complete data-centre installations. In 2016 it bought a majority stake in the British company Technology Space Integration, forming a joint venture named Stulz Technology Integration, and in March 2020 it took over the whole of that business, Cooling Post reported. The trade paper described the unit’s work as ranging from small containerised systems to large installations for high-performance computing.

Cabinets, chillers and data halls.

The makers of uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution and precision cooling sell equipment that most people never see. It stands in plant rooms and data halls behind locked doors, so the companies tend to show it in place: long rows of grey cabinets under white light, battery strings racked floor to ceiling, switchgear with its doors open, and chillers and heat-rejection units lined up on rooftops and in yards outside.

The data hall itself has become the stock image of the trade. Photographs and renderings return again and again to cold-aisle containment, with server racks closed in behind glass doors and ceiling panels, to cooling units set between the racks, and to engineers with laptops checking a cabinet’s display. As computing loads have grown, liquid-cooling pipework, coolant units and prefabricated modules built off site have joined the cabinets in the pictures.

Factories, test laboratories and trade fairs supply the rest. These companies often show their own production lines and test bays, where equipment is run before it ships, and the industry gathers at events such as Data Centre World and the DCD conference series, where makers fill stands with UPS cabinets, cooling units and power distribution gear and present new ranges to data-centre operators and engineers. Corporate language leans on continuity: Vertiv, for example, presented itself as “Architects of Continuity” when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

The companies in this guide range from listed groups to family firms, and several carry long histories under changing owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name in capitals.

STULZ describes itself as a Hamburg-based family business, and its 2022 sustainability report opens its letter to readers by calling the company a family business of air-conditioning technology with a 75-year tradition. German Wikipedia says the group is organised as a concern with Stulz Verwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG as its parent company and its head office in Hamburg, and that the climate division works through subsidiaries in more than twenty countries, from Ireland and Poland to Australia, Brazil and Singapore.

Production is spread across continents. German Wikipedia places the climate division’s factories in the United States, Italy, Spain, England, China, Brazil and India. The 2022 report counts eleven production sites worldwide, naming Germany, the United States, China, Brazil, Spain, Italy, India and Britain among them, with Hamburg serving as headquarters and a production site; the company’s network page gives 35 subsidiaries, ten of them with production, and puts the STULZ Group’s staff at about 8,200 people. Sales and service run through partners in more than 140 countries, the company says, and it dates its steady expansion abroad to 1974. The 2022 report, which covers the German climate business, STULZ GmbH, counts about 3,500 people in the climate division worldwide and 857 in Germany, most of them in Hamburg.

The company writes its name in capitals, STULZ, and German Wikipedia records that spelling as its own. On its website the company sums up its offer as “Your climate. Our mission.”

For a design guide, STULZ shows how a post-war appliance maker recast itself as a specialist in cooling for computer rooms while keeping its family name in capitals. Compare Munters, another maker of climate equipment used in data centres, and Vertiv, another name among the makers of power and cooling equipment for data halls. For this guide we use a deep teal, slate and a cool white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep STULZ’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.