Networks Europe May-Jun 2018 | Page 34

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