Modular cooling system meeting data center capacity changes

Modular cooling system meeting data center capacity changes

The main reason for Amazon's success is that the company has invested heavily in building data centers or leasing data centers for high-tech startups. More and more traditional enterprises are using the services they provide. The cloud infrastructure business of Amazon's network service company currently has an annual revenue of more than $7 billion.

Amazon's network service company has the powerful ability to manage data centers to ensure its support for business growth. Amazon provides users with additional virtual servers, users only need to pay for the capacity they actually use, and Amazon has changed the capacity management policies and methods.

But at least today, public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for many enterprises and applications, whether due to regulatory and security issues or performance issues) it is not an infrastructure choice. Although Amazon and its rival Microsoft are trying to ensure that users choose to use them, this is why physical data centers continue to flourish. Because when enterprises deploy servers in hosted data centers, they want to be able to control and dedicated infrastructure performance.

However, hosting services do not provide elastic company public infrastructure as a service (IaaS), because it is difficult to meet the needs of both full control and elasticity, some service providers are looking for a compromise between the two.

If a company increases its production capacity, it is difficult to increase its quantity. However, if you can find a customer and use this capability, the construction scale can achieve a higher profit margin. However, if this is not done, the final production capacity will be wasted.

Modular Design

Why modular? As a concept, in the design of a large data center, modularization means rapid expansion with small increments. This concept is from the mechanical cooling equipment or UPS unit of the computer room, and even to the data center of the container module, it is basically a self-contained data center.

The required modular work is part of rapid module installation on site, while the other is a good supply chain that can generate modules quickly enough when needed.

Data center capacity requirements

A seven-month-old data center service provider is using a modular cooling system provided by inertech to introduce a more flexible hosting model.

After building a plaino data center in Texas, Aligned's data center can provide customers with tailored manufacturing capacity and business capabilities, and expand their use scale as needed. More importantly, this data center is the first physical data center that can reduce the proportion based on the Payment capability. Implementing physical infrastructure is much more difficult than providing virtual machines on a public cloud.

The flexibility of Aligned's data center comes from its cooling system, designed by its sister company Inertech. Currently, eBay, Lenovo, and Telus data centers all use this cooling system, which can increase or reduce the capacity by 300 KW, aligned's data center chief operating officer thomas dorty said. "This is indeed a flexible and variable infrastructure that can be expanded or scaled down ."

Although it is not as fast as IaaS, it is also a compromise because an additional 300 KW of data center capacity will be deployed within 8 weeks. Dorti said the company has established a more in-depth and strictly controlled supply chain to ensure model operation.

Aligned energy Holdings owns some of the shares of Aligned and Inertech. Supported by hedge fund Blue Mountains Capital Management, it includes two other subsidiaries: EnergyMetrics, which sells data center infrastructure management software, karbon engineering company whose main business is Data Center Consulting, design and debugging service.

Aligned's first 0.3 million-square-foot data center, built in plaino, is about to complete its first phase of the project, which will achieve 30 megawatt of power generation. The company has also started construction of a 0.55 million-square-foot data center with a capacity of 65 megawatt in Phoenix, and said this is the next construction in the site selection process, aligned will look for locations to build data centers in New Jersey in California, Illinois, and Virginia.

Inertech's modular Cooling System

ThermalHub, a key component of inertech's cooling system design, replaces traditional mechanical chillers with greater energy consumption. ThermalHub will absorb heat from the data center floor and discharge it out.

According to the inertech website, a 100-ton ThermalHub only requires 500 watts of power, and its cooling capability is the same as that provided by traditional chillers and Cooling pumps that consume 90000 watts of power. The calculation assumes that natural cooling is used, and the external air temperature is the same in both cases.

This Hub is the core module component of the cooling system and can be quickly deployed or removed as needed. If the customer has exceeded its computing capacity and requires a reduction, the extra Hub can be transferred to another customer to provide services for the customer.

In a data center in plaino plelaligned, the Hub will be the core component of the cooling system in the data center. dorty explains that the server heat can be discharged from the IT rack through the Hub from the heat sink.

Once the heat is accumulated on a Hub, it can be discharged by a hot bus. In the words of inertech, this is a hot transfer "highway", a more efficient and energy-saving alternative air conditioning system. This bus can be quickly connected through modular components and added or deleted as needed.

At the last station of the Heat journey, heat is discharged from the user's cooling solution, whether it is a fluid cooler, cooling tower, dry cooler, etc.

Aligned customers pay monthly electricity fees for their actual used capacity. dorty declined to disclose its cost per kW, but said it would be a competitive market price.

He believes that a managed product is needed to better deploy infrastructure for customers who need it in actual usage. He said they complained about disconnections between the data center lease agreement and the energy bill in their conversations with big banks.

At present, some customers have realized that they will pay for the infrastructure they have never used, which is the solution to the problem.