Find out how the five benefits of the Liquid cooling technology can boost sustainability and productivity while scaling up to meet DX needs.
As data centers scale up to support cloud and colocation services, and businesses spend more on Big Data, analytics and AI, energy consumption is also surging—necessitating eco-friendly initiatives to boost efficiency.
As a result, sustainability has become a more prominent aspect of the infrastructure. Achieving this means designing more efficient data centers to power next-gen technologies.
One such innovation is liquid immersion cooling.
Striving for carbon neutrality
According to research from academic journal Science, data centers are believed to be responsible for about one percent of the world’s energy consumption. While this does not sound like a significant number, the fact that we are seeing more data intensive applications emerging such as 5G, innovations in chip design, as well as advancements in the field of science and research, only shows that we are relying more and more in high-density computing.
To reduce energy consumption in the data centers many colocation providers are looking for innovative solutions. This is where liquid cooling comes in.
Liquid cooling technology utilizes liquid coolant or dielectric liquids a higher heat transfer value than air to maximize data center cooling. This makes liquid cooling an efficient and sustainable option, with approaches such as cold plating or immersion cooling to suit different needs.
Therefore, it is no surprise that more and more data centers are turning to this option to meet the growing power demands generated by the growth of edge computing, rack densities, and new energy efficiency and sustainability requirements.
While liquid cooling can help data centers become carbon neutral, it requires customization, and must be interoperable and flexible enough to scale with the organisation’s IT needs at large core sites as well as at smaller edge sites. Economies of scale will make improvements in energy efficiency more noticeable.
Consequently, Vertiv has observed a growing demand for liquid cooling deployments globally throughout 2020 driven by the following stakeholders:
- cloud operators exploring innovative cooling solution to drive efficiency in their data centers to support AI applications
- telcos rolling out 5G applications to the edge
- data companies providing complex data solution such as seismic & geology including sub-surface imaging and satellite imaging
- gateway payment companies in certain sectors such as sport gambling
- financial institutions supporting High Frequency Trading, and Cryptocurrency mining, among others
Benefits of liquid cooling
- Reduced energy usage
Lowers the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of the data centers. The removal of server fans can lower server energy cost by up-to 10% depending on the airflow and load. - Reduced footprint
Overall data center footprint can be reduced for a given load because these system do not require as much space as compared to conventional room-based cooling components. The resultant compaction enables IT and compute in places where conventional cooling systems cannot support. - Improved layout flexibility
The reduced footprint and usage effectiveness allows for greater flexibility on how the equipment in the data centers is arranged, compared to conventional air-cooling whereby airflow is typically managed with a hot/cold aisle containment. The data hall layout can be simplified depending on piping paths and maintainability. - Reduced climate dependency
Unlike conventional air-cooled systems that depend on specific geographical location and climate for effective deployment, liquid cooling technology uses warm water for economization, and can provide standardization and high efficiency deployment of core, regional and edge data centers across more geographical locations.
Sustainability is the bottom line
As total energy consumption and IT infrastructure development skyrockets due to digital transformation, data centers operators are under greater pressure today to manage their environmental footprint.
New cooling technologies for greenifying data centers are helping them achieve this. These technologies are enabling companies to implement direct evaporative, indirect evaporative, hybrid system and liquid cooling to lower PUE and total energy consumption as data centers gets larger to meet digitalization needs.
In the Asia Pacific region, deployments of liquid cooling are increasing to take infrastructure cooling to the next level. This trend has the potential to help data centers attract new customers seeking partnerships with more sustainable companies, and also improve energy output as demand for computing continues to reach unprecedented levels.
