I N T E L L I G E N T T E C H N O L O G Y COOLING
Next-generation of AI-powered cooling to balance performance and environmental responsibility in data centres
OVHcloud, a global cloud player and the European Cloud leader, has unveiled a new cooling architecture for its data centres. The OVHcloud Smart Datacenter combines new industrial designs with AI features, reducing both power and water consumption and enabling data centres to intelligently react to their surrounding environments. Through this new technology, OVHcloud is able to reduce water consumption by up to 30 % and cooling electricity consumption by up to 50 %.
In development for the past two years, the fifth generation of the OVHcloud server rack has been redesigned to host a new generation of servers and supercharge the group commitment to a sustainable cloud. The most significant change is the server layout where clusters of servers are connected in serial when it comes to their cooling, with servers for each cluster being still organised in parallel, thus facilitating maintenance. This new design streamlines component layouts including the location of the inrack CDU and helps reduce power consumption at the rack level.
Smart and autonomous, the rack behaves in a‘ pull’ hydraulic configuration so that each server has the right water flow and pressure for its cooling needs. Hardware components such as CPU and GPU are cooled through direct-to-chip waterblocks designed by OVHcloud, dissipating heat through a closed looped water circuit that extends to a single cooling loop across the whole datacenter.
The Cooling Module( also called CDU) is now approximately 50 % more compact and is located outside the rack. It can cool down several rows of racks and features more than 30 sensors. These sensors monitor elements from the racks including pressure, speed and water temperature and can adjust cooling settings in real-time. The sensors enable the rack to be‘ aware’ of its immediate surroundings and data centre temperatures and the smart cooling module can automatically adjust to server workloads. This optimisation greatly extends the lifespan of the equipment and helps to optimise infrastructure power consumption.
The Smart Dry Cooler, located on the outside, is the last cooling component of the closed water loop. It now takes up half the space and has half the number of fans as the previous generation of equipment. This helps reduce cooling power consumption by up to 50 % while also reducing ambient noise level.
By constantly analysing its surroundings and the behaviour of key components, new OVHcloud Smart Racks not only regulate themselves but also collect operational data. Data coming from the racks, cooling modules and Dry Coolers are fed into a data lake so that complex algorithms can determine predictive behaviours, contributing to optimised maintenance. The system can also be connected to a local weather station to enrich the data lake. The new models can predict and inject the exact volume of water that is needed by the adiabatic cooling pads of the Dry Cooler to allow for outside heat exchange.
The new dry cooler design accounts for a 30 % reduction of water consumption, which has the potential to significantly improve OVHcloud’ s already-compelling WUE ratio. Unlike traditional adiabatic systems, the OVHcloud cooling pad does not feature a recirculation loop: complex hydraulic units such as pumps, tanks and level sensors have been eliminated, reducing infrastructure complexity and simplifying maintenance. �
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