Avnet, Schneider Electric, and Iceotope have been joined by the experts at Lenovo to bring us the industry’s first commercially available HPC micro data centre solution, cooled by integrated chassis-level immersion. 

Lenovo is to deploy its Lenovo ThinkSystem SR670 servers in a highly scalable, GPU-rich, liquid-cooled micro data centre solution.

Sealed at the chassis level, the new solution enables artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads to be deployed in close proximity to the location of data generation and use regardless of how harsh the environment is.

Avnet is providing the integration services for the solution on behalf of Schneider Electric and Iceotope to help them deploy globally to a wide range of customers. The unique capabilities and technologies Avnet brings to the partnership include:

• Conversion of the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR670 to liquid cooling and integration of Schneider Electric’s APC NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system.
• Software development to deliver Out of Band Management (OOBM) capability. Through Witekio, an Avnet company, it is working with Iceotope to offer a RedFish-compliant solution that is enabled by Avnet’s MaaxBoard IoT single board computer.
• A full portfolio of lifecycle services such as warranty support, field installation and maintenance, advance exchange, repair/refurbishment, and IT asset disposition and value recovery.

The groundbreaking solution is based on Iceotope’s Ku:l 2 liquid-cooled chassis which provides unique value by completely isolating the critical IT from the environment with a perfectly sealed and resilient enclosure.

This enables secure and tamper-proof computing, storage and networking, providing an extra level of physical and I/O connective security in the most extreme locations and climatic conditions.

With Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT solution, remote monitoring and management is taken to a new level enabling proactive insights on critical assets that impact the health and availability of IT environments, so infrastructure performance is optimised and risk is minimised.

“Liquid cooled servers that are cost effectively deployed at scale will revolutionise the server industry as well as computing in general by cutting energy usage, noise and space requirements,” said Scott MacDonald, president, Avnet Integrated.

“Avnet Integrated is uniquely positioned to simplify the deployment of this solution for our customers in collaboration with Schneider Electric, Iceotope and Lenovo. Its ability to solve complex problems on a global scale for large customers while closely collaborating with all partners is what differentiates us as an advanced systems integrator,” MacDonald said.

David Craig, CEO Iceotope commented, “The infrastructure to provision edge expansion will be installed where space provides, outside traditional data centres – we call this the Fluid Edge.

“Iceotope is dedicated to ensuring the durability, reliability, efficiency and long-term viability of Fluid Edge facilities, where air cooled approaches have a limited future.

“Partnering with Lenovo to bring the Ku:l Micro DC to life has accelerated our capability to provide a proven and warranty-backed, chassis-level immersion cooled HPC design solution to this expanding market.”

Steven Carlini, VP Innovation and Data Centre, Schneider Electricstated, “This integrated, immersion cooled solution brings highly intensive and efficient edge computing capabilities that ‘drop into’ applications from the edge to large scale HPCs.

“The ability to bring these ready-to-deploy liquid cooled solutions to market proves the strength of the Avnet, Schneider Electric and Iceotope partnership.”

Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of Server, Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure, Lenovo Data Centre Group added, “The demands of today’s high-performance IT are driving power and cooling requirements beyond the typical air-cooled data centre. 

“Liquid cooling is far more efficient at heat transfer and removal than air, allowing customers around the globe to achieve extreme performance within their current data centre footprint. 

“Lenovo extends its leadership capability with deployment-ready solutions based on Iceotope’s KU:l chassis-level immersion cooling technologies in partnership with Schneider Electric and Avnet Integrated.”   

Samir Bounab, Witekio CRO concluded, “We are proud to support Iceotope in delivering OOBM capabilities with our ability to leverage the Avnet Maaxboard. Our team brings software expertise; from system architecture and app development to software security aspects including secure boot and certificate configuration.”