Intelligent Data Centres Issue 42 | Page 55

intelligent POWER AND COOLING

Iceotope collaborates with Intel and HPE to boost sustainability

Iceotope , a global leader in precision immersion cooling , has announced its chassis-level cooling system . Ku : l Data Centre is the product of a close collaboration between Iceotope , Intel and HPE and promises a faster path to net zero operations by reducing Edge and data centre energy use by nearly a third .

Once the sole preserve of arcane , highperformance computing applications , liquid cooling is increasingly seen as essential technology for reliable and efficient operations of any IT load in any location . There is a pressing concern about sustainability impacts as distributed Edge Computing environments proliferate to meet the demand for data processing nearer the point of use , as well as growing facility power and cooling consumption driven by AI augmentation and hotter chips .
Working together with Intel and HPE , Iceotope benchmarked the power consumption of a sample IT installation being cooled respectively using air and precision immersion liquid cooling . The results show a substantial advantage in favour of liquid cooling , reducing overall power use across IT and cooling infrastructure .
To understand the operational advantages of Iceotope ’ s precision immersion cooling system , Ku : l Data Centre was compared to a traditional air-cooled system using a 19.6kW load comprising 16x HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers under stress test conditions .
Laboratory tests , using industry-standard high power computing benchmarks across a range of ambient temperatures , demonstrated that the Iceotope Precision Immersion Cooled system enabled a 4 % increase in performance with zero throttling in higher ambient temperatures at server level and consumed 1kW less energy at rack level than its air-cooled counterpart . This represents a 5 % energy saving in the IT alone and a 30 % saving at scale based on a typical cooling Power Usage Effectiveness ( PUE ) of 1.4 in air and 1.04 in liquid-cooled data centres .
Air cooling cannot be used precisely or sustainably to cool high-power chips and processors and it is commonly held that it is no longer a suitable approach for ensuring an appropriate operating environment for increasingly energy dense IT equipment .
Not only is liquid a significantly more effective medium for heat removal than air , but each liquid-cooled chassis is 100 % sealed , protecting the critical IT from the surrounding atmosphere – rendering it impervious to dust , gases and humidity – and creating a stable operating environment . Isolating the IT from the external environment opens a world of potential facility sites and distributed IT locations that could not have been considered until now .
Iceotope Director of Product Strategy , Jason Matteson , said : “ Accommodating a precipitous increase in chip power at the same time as lowering carbon emissions in distributed Edge locations as well as data centres is problematic . Iceotope ’ s Ku : l Data Centre demonstrates a very practical response to an urgent need for a paradigm shift in data centre design .” � www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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