04 August 2023

Martin Bradburn, CEO, PeaSoup

The famous New York skyline looked like a hellscape for the first weeks of June due to the raging wildfires spewing smoke and ash across 28,000sqkm of Canada into the United States, a large percentage of Manhattenites were literally drowning in smoke, and it was partly caused by the uptick in global temperatures attributed to manmade climate change.

Data centres underpin many critical industries including healthcare, government departments, and financial services. The exponential growth in the digital world has seen many solutions touted. Geographical location (like with ping and latency) can play just as much a part as the age of a data centres infrastructure.

Energy costs associated with data centre cooling are huge, in fact, it is estimated that the industry consumes 1.5% of globally produced electricity (IEA), based upon kWh - that’s more than Ethiopia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Tanzania combined.

This is predicted to rise in the coming decades as cloud services, edge computing, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI) are integrated into everyday life, very much like the internet before them. This rise in usage will need to be counterbalanced by improved cooling methods as there are inefficiencies baked into almost all data centres.

Older data centres are typically environmental outliers due to the scattergun nature of the technology in them and the real estate they occupy. Compared to larger, modern facilities, they are inefficient, air-cooled and, generally, like a lot of technology, out-of-date.

Air-cooling technologies, from calibrated vector cooling (CVC) to free cooling, maintain the inherent inefficiencies associated with the first generation of cooling technology – they require a lot of energy and introduce contaminants (like dust) into the data centre, and waste heat into the environment.

Mismanagement of cooling systems in a data centre results in significant detriment to the hardware, including servers and data storage devices. These are often homes to critical digital infrastructure, like banks, and any downtime or failing in the components can result in large fines from regulators or deeply dissatisfied consumers, as we see with internet banking outages and, even more seriously, data leaks, hacks and breaches.

Innovators in the space are impacting on the efficiency of data centres through liquid immersion cooling technology. Immersion systems involve submerging the hardware in a non-conductive dielectric fluid within a leak proof case. The dielectric fluid absorbs heat more efficiently, the vapour produced further aids in cooling as it is recycled back into the system. This technology runs every server with 20% less power for the same performance that it does in air. Using 20% less power also means they’re producing 20% less emissions too. There’s no air contamination and oxidisation of components is equally negated.

The further benefits of liquid immersion technology include no noise pollution – important for employee wellbeing. Increasing rack density enables a smaller physical footprint for the data centre. This also increases computing power per rack – limits can be pushed towards 100kW per rack. These are very impressive results considering traditional cooling methods only reach 25kW.

“Energy costs associated with data centre cooling are huge, in fact, it is estimated that the industry consumes 1.5% of globally produced electricity (IEA), based upon kWh - that’s more than Ethiopia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Tanzania combined.”

Energy requirements are lower when compared to air cooling which needs a significant amount of power. This leads to lower costs and a cleaner environment if renewable energy sources are used. Liquid immersion cooling offers comparatively higher performance too due to the elimination of thermal shutdown and hot spots, something which air cooling cannot replicate. Additionally, heat waste reuse is possible where outgoing heated fluid can be diverted into an external heating system for reuse. This creates a circular economy (of use) which benefits everyone.

To tackle the serious business of data centre cooling and what technologies are going to have a true impact on the current business model, big (and small) players in the cloud computing space will have to continue to move away from air-cooling when they plan and build the hyperscale data centres of today, let alone tomorrow.
Climate change, population migration from the countryside to cities, new emerging technologies and other factors which drive changes in human behaviour will see the waste heat produced from data centres put to practical use, or eliminated, in the UK.