There is a digital revolution happening within the modern data center. New types of workloads – IoT, Big Data, Cloud – are changing the way we deploy and control our data center infrastructures. Through it all, efficiency improvements have played an enormous role in taming the growth rate of the data center industry’s energy consumption. Without these improvements, staying at the efficiency levels of 2010, data centers would have consumed close to 40 billion kWh more than they did in 2014 to do the same amount of work, according to a study conducted by the US Department of Energy in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon University.
With that in mind it’s important to ask: What are these major efficiency improvements impacting the digital data center?
Many data center operators have created a science out of maximizing server utilization and data center efficiency, contributing in a big way to the slow-down of the industry’s overall energy use. Today, data center providers are making investments in improvements that will positively impact the efficiency of their facilities’ infrastructure, as well as the power and data center cooling equipment that supports their clients’ IT gear.
The proliferation of cloud technologies is absolutely evident in today’s market. Organizations are seeing direct benefits behind a distributed, and robust, cloud ecosystem. Most of all, these organizations are finding amazing ways to leverage cloud services as direct competitive advantages. We’re seeing more use-cases around data analytics, business intelligence, and big data deployments. Here’s the other part, we’re also seeing organizations increase their spend around critical data center and cloud systems.
“Over the past several years, the software industry has been shifting to a cloud-first (SaaS) development and deployment model,” said Frank Gens, Senior Vice President & Chief Analyst at IDC. “By 2018, most software vendors will have fully shifted to a SaaS/PaaS codebase. This means that many enterprise software customers, as they reach their next major software upgrade decisions, will be offered SaaS as the preferred option. Put together, new solutions born on the cloud and traditional solutions migrating to the cloud will steadily pull more customers and their data to the cloud.”
In this Data Center Frontier Special Report on Liquid Cooling, underwritten by Ebullient, you will learn about the new requirements surrounding new digital data center demands. Specifically, the paper explores:
- Impacts of cloud on high-density computing
- How Big Data is impacting your data center
- Understanding growing energy and cooling utilization
- Creating powerful cooling and server designs
- Understanding liquid cooling: why engineered fluid is better than water
- Cooling next-generation NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU cards
- How liquid cooling is revolutionizing data center design
Although there will still be a place for traditional, airflow-based, cooling methodologies, many organizations are now looking into liquid cooling for their servers and overall data center environments. Most of all, high density computing, like those used for high performance computing (HPC) and big data, require a new way to remain efficient.
Next generation data centers will overcome the inherent disadvantages around air cooling through liquid cooling technologies. Liquid cooling systems absorb heat directly at the source (rather than cooling the entire DC space) and greatly reduce flow because liquid densities are about 1,000 times greater than air. Today, single-phase liquid cooling systems absorb heat by warming water-glycol or oil. Unfortunately, water-glycol systems present catastrophic shorting and maintenance risks, while oil immersion systems complicate servicing and often rely on custom server designs.
Download this Special Report today to learn how precision two-phase liquid cooling systems create a direct-to-chip cooling technology that harnesses advantages of phase change heat transfer to deliver exceptional performance and efficiency.