34
COOLING
Liquid
cooling
By Thomas J. Goldthorpe, Head
of New Business Development,
Iceotope
www.iceotope.com
There are many challenges facing
data centres and the best solutions
may not be the most obvious ones
We know technology is evolving as software, hardware and
services converge. This, of course, presents challenges, but
also opportunities and new ventures. We face significant
commercial and regulatory changes that will drive faster
IT refreshes, server density and the need to consume fewer
resources natural and otherwise per server. This change
is expected and foreseeable. But the change that people
are not expecting or preparing for is that traditional ways
of handling compute power won’t work: the data centres
of today simply can’t scale up to the performance and
energy challenges coming fast and furiously at us. There
are four factors driving this change: people, place, power
and planet.
The people factor
Considering the exponential growth in Internet usage we’ve
seen over the past 15 years, it may be surprising that only
around 51% of the world’s population has Internet access.
This will continue to rise and at a faster rate of adoption than
seen previously.
Today, around 54% of the world’s population live in cities,
and ten times the population of London is moving to cities
globally every year. Accordingly, this figure is expected to rise
to 66% by 2050. Growing urbanisation will also fuel growth in
the middle class, and middle classes need goods and services
to consume. The middle class in Asia alone is expected to be
some 3 billion strong by 2030.
As well as driving further growth in Internet usage, this
growth in urbanisation and membership of the middle
class will create all kinds of opportunities in emerging
technologies such as AI, VR/AR and autonomous vehicles. The
opportunities these consumers will provide for dominance,
growth and profits are almost incalculable. We’re not limited
in ambition, creativity or means – the limiting factors are
things like water and power.
Data centre power
Despite CPUs continuing to get incrementally faster, the
thermal overheads have remained roughly the same. Heat
loads have only had to deal with relatively low power chips.
Data Centre In A Box
All the key data centre capabilities.....
.......just on a smaller scale.
ENCLOSURES
POWER DISTRIBUTION
CLIMATE CONTROL