The data center interpretation of the trend of liquid-cooled server

With the rapid development of mobile data, cloud computing and big data services, the scale of data center construction is getting larger and larger. Data center owners' demands for energy conservation in data centers also gradually come to the fore. In recent years, many data center energy-saving technologies have emerged, but none of them has broken through the bottleneck of thinking. They have been paying attention to the technical innovation of data center infrastructure at their own level without incorporating the server facilities into data center energy conservation projects. In a unified manner, Think about energy-efficiency issues in your data center, making it hard to break the 1.60 threshold of data center design PUE.

Dawn liquid-cooled server PHPC300

Industry criticized the data center troubled energy consumption

The Internet bubble that left the world around 2000, the legacy of technology left behind by humans, was a revolution in the form of servers and a revolution in the concept of data center construction. Racked servers replaced tower servers due to the scale of servers. Simultaneously, The revolution in data center construction ideas - from the room environment to the cabinet micro-environment changes, elevated floor data center data center construction standards.

In the following decade, the data center market has gradually entered a period of rapid development. Racking IT equipment saves physical space in the data center and raises cabinet power density. Data center power density gradually from low density to medium density development, during which there have been many technical issues such as local hot spots. Regrettably, in response to these emerging technological issues, the industry did not realize that this was a sign of a new era of higher power density. Instead of thinking hard about how to deal with it, it irresponsibly tried to solve it using traditional methods New question As a result, the PUE for the data center's energy consumption index has been hard to break through 1.60, though gradually decreasing from the initial 3.00 to below 2.00.

The reason for this is the lack of industry integration thinking in technology development strategies. In fact, the largest contribution to data center energy consumption equipment or components - - CPUs, memory, server cooling systems, data center air conditioning systems, data center UPS systems, and related industries are all researching and developing energy-saving technologies on their own and the potential for technological innovation in most industries has been exhausted. Technical strategy and way of thinking, a few major technical achievements made impossible.

Some industry leaders at home and abroad have realized this problem and started to take action. Currently, there are two main technical directions: high-temperature air-cooled server with direct fresh air direct cooling technology, and liquid-cooled server with the data center water system or indirect natural cooling fluorine system technology. The former achieves energy conservation by increasing server heat source grade and special climate, while the latter achieves energy saving by reducing the loss of heat grade in the heat transfer process.

In 2013, Facebook opened its data center in Lule, a town in the north of Sweden, using fresh air direct natural cooling technology. Luleå is located on the north shore of the Baltic Sea, only 100 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. The local climate is one of the important reasons why Facebook chose to set up Luleå. According to Facebook, Luleå temperatures have been above 30 degrees for less than 24 hours since 1961, and setting up a data center in the area will save a significant amount of cooling costs. However, judging from the climatic conditions all over the country, the temperatures in the south are high and the sandstorms in the north are large. There is almost no ideal location for data centers like Luleå. Globally, the application of fresh air natural cooling technology is less Few.

Liquid-cooled server technology is rarely limited, because it does not require air to enter the data center and does not even require air to enter the server.

As early as a few years ago, IBM and other companies to develop an indirect liquid-cooled servers using pure water as the working fluid instead of air-cooled servers to significantly improve PUE targets, because they realized that the air as a cooling medium , Far from the ideal material of choice; and water is 1,000 times more efficient than air. The so-called indirect liquid cooling, refers to the liquid does not contact the heating components, but through the cold plate, cold storage and other liquid and heat components isolated.

The United States, Intel and the United States 3M are taking another route, using a special liquid in direct contact with the heat-generating components for heat exchange, that is, direct liquid-cooled server technology, or submerged liquid-cooled server technology. This requires finding a technique that directly contacts the heat-generating components with a very good property, such as electromagnetic compatibility, electrical compatibility, physical compatibility, and chemical compatibility. Zhongke Shuguang has been studying the technology of liquid-cooled server since 2010, and the future development direction of liquid-cooled server can be said to be "similar to what the hero sees" with the 3M Company in the United States. Innovation has been made in many technologies and new technologies have been formed system.

Liquid-cooled server to create a new benchmark for industry consumption

Dawn has been committed to efficient refrigeration technology research, and continue to be applied to the product to benefit the majority of dawn customers. Zhongke Shuguang CloudBASE® Series C1000 / 2000/3000/4000 solutions are for air-cooled servers, using air flow organization optimization (including the pool level, row and cabinet level), temperature and humidity control decoupling, Based on the country-wide operational data of these current scenarios, the proven implementation of proven technologies has succeeded in reducing the data center's PUE from 2.00 to 1.60.

Shuguang liquid cooling server in Leipzig, Germany ISC'14 live show

At present, the latest liquid-cooled server technology is the result of innovation made by Zhongke Dawning using its own in-depth understanding of server requirements and the technical strength of server development. From the current laboratory data, using a liquid-cooled server data center, coupled with an efficient fluorine pump cycle, removes the compressor and operates naturally during the year, allowing PUE values to be easily reduced from 1.60 to 1.20.

With the leading level in the industry and the first direct immersion liquid-cooled server adopting 3M's electronic refrigerant technology in China, its high availability, high density and ultra-low PUE will inevitably shake the industry's energy saving for data centers Technical cognition. From the cost analysis perspective, although the dawn of the liquid-cooled server products than air-cooled server product manufacturing costs have increased, but the supporting data center infrastructure manufacturing costs are offset by some of the cost of incremental decline, the data center Overall CapEX did not change significantly. However, a significant reduction in OpEX due to energy savings has resulted in a significant reduction in data center TCO, an excellent economic performance that is driving the industry's drive to recognize this revolutionary technology.

In the dawn of the Zhongke, the server liquid-cooling technology is bound to bring about changes in the physical form of the server, while bringing about changes in the construction of data centers, which has a profound impact on the pattern of the information industry.