Schneider Electric’s partnership with Avnet and Iceotope has finally delivered on its promise to launch a new liquid cooling solution for data centres, which was first teased back in October. The new solution claims to be the industry’s first integrated rack with immersed, liquid-cooled IT for data centres.
While data centres need to invest in GPU-based IT to handle big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, there comes a significant downside to the technology. That’s because it generates a lot more heat than typical CPU-based IT, meaning data centres either have to spend more on cooling or look for liquid cooled solutions.
Schneider Electric is now offering such a solution, with it pairing its NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system with a GPU server that features Iceotope’s chassis-based immersion cooled technology.
“Schneider Electric is committed to making data centres more sustainable and liquid cooling is a very compelling approach,” said Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation, Secure Power, Schneider Electric.
“This latest development marks a significant step toward industrialising chassis-based immersion solutions which offer the efficiency and effectiveness of tanks based solutions while providing the compatibility and serviceability of more traditional, ‘direct-to-chip’ liquid-cooling designs. Given the growth of compute-intensive applications, we believe this approach is very promising.”
Adapting to changing markets, trends, and technologies
“As a leading global technology solutions provider, Avnet has always excelled at adapting to changing markets, trends, and technologies,” said Scott MacDonald, global president, Avnet Integrated.
“We do well at this by partnering with the world’s best technology designers and hardware manufacturers. In this case, we’re partnering with liquid cooling-specialist, Iceotope, and global infrastructure giant, Schneider Electric, to make the best possible liquid cooling solutions for our customers. We’re excited to integrate, fulfill, and support this solution that smartly addresses customer cooling challenges around rising chip densities, harsh IT environments, rising energy costs, water use restrictions, and space constraints.”
As with the majority of Schneider’s products, its liquid cooling solution is EcoStruxure Ready, meaning it can be managed using the company’s DCIM software, EcoStruxure IT Expert.
David Craig, CEO of Iceotope, added, “Iceotope is thrilled to be making its innovative chassis-level, immersive liquid cooling technology available to the general market.
“We offer the only liquid cooling tech that scales easily from edge computing devices to large server farms in the cloud. And compared to direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems, our approach is more efficient, more reliable, saves more space, eliminates fans, and when deployed across the data centre, it lowers cost.”
