Schneider Electric has collaborated with Avnet and Iceotope to announce the industry’s first commercially available integrated rack with chassis-based immersive liquid cooling, designed for compute-intensive applications. The joint solution was unveiled at the Schneider Electric booth during the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas.
The integrated rack combines a high-specification GPU server in a 1U tray with Iceotope’s liquid cooling. The Avnet liquid-cooled server is integrated with Schneider’s NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure to provide easy deployment into data centres with increased efficiency. The liquid-cooled rack solution is available with next-generation data centre management software and is Schneider Electric EcoStruxure ready.
Schneider Electric hopes the new immersive liquid cooling solution will be ideal for applications in big data centre analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm training environments as it will provide improved efficiency and reduce energy usage.
“This latest development marks a significant step toward industrializing 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.” Said Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation, Secure Power, Schneider Electric.
In a recent report by Gartner, analyst Henrique Cecci advised data centre operators that liquid cooling solutions will increase cooling energy efficiency in their systems as it offers lower operating costs, increases reliability and requires a smaller footprint compared to traditional designs while offering near-silent operation despite the high-power density of the GPUs. Schneider Electric plans to extend this relationship with Avnet and Iceotope by offering the solution to more OEMs as demand grows.
“Iceotope is thrilled to be making its innovative chassis-level, immersive liquid cooling technology available to the general market,” said David Craig, CEO of Iceotope. “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.”
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KitGuru says: What do you guys think to this new immersed, liquid-cooled rack solution from Schneider Electric? Is this method of liquid cooling the future for rack servers or would the proven reliability of traditional systems still be the preferred option for some time yet?