Today at Schneider Electric, we made an exciting announcement: we introduced our industry’s first commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. We view this as an important step to bring the benefits of immersion cooling to the mainstream market that is fully compatible with standard architectures. Immersion cooling promises lower operating costs, higher efficiencies, a smaller footprint, and fan-less operation. We see no other available technology that can have such a dramatic impact on energy efficiency.

We are unveiling this first-of-its-kind solution at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas. However, what happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas this time (sorry – couldn’t resist) because we believe this is a solution the industry has been waiting for and we hope the news will spread.

A little background: In October at Innovation Summit in Barcelona, Schneider Electric announced that we entered a strategic partnership with Iceotope and Avnet to collaborate on innovative liquid cooling solutions. This new solution we just announced is an important next (but not last!) step in our partnership. It combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope’s liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. Avnet integrates the liquid-cooled server with Schneider Electric’s NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system for simple deployment into data centers or edge computing environments.

Liquid Cooling: A Technology to Watch

While liquid cooling has been around for a long time, we believe that the latest chips with much higher Thermal Design Power (TDP) are creating unique challenges for air cooling. Enter liquid cooling, which is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, which tend to utilize these higher TDP chips.

In a recent report published by Gartner*, liquid cooling was identified as a technology to watch. Analyst Henrique Cecci advised data center operators to “maximize cooling energy efficiencies by employing modern liquid cooling solutions.” Liquid cooling offers greater efficiency, lower operating costs, smaller footprint, increased reliability, and nearly silent operation despite the high-power density of the GPUs.

Today’s development marks a significant step toward industrializing chassis-based immersion solutions. These solutions uniquely offer the efficiency and effectiveness of tank-based solutions while providing the compatibility and serviceability of more traditional, ‘direct-to-chip’ liquid-cooling designs.

And the new solution is EcoStruxure Ready, so it’s available with next-generation data center management, EcoStruxure IT Expert, and our digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor.

More to Come on the Liquid Cooling Front

By collaborating with Avnet and Iceotope, we plan to expand the offer as demand grows and hope to welcome other server OEMs into the partnership. Given the growth of compute-intensive applications, we believe this approach is very promising.

For more information about liquid cooling technologies, their application to data centers and edge computing environments, and to inquire about this new integrated, liquid-cooled rack solution, check out our new liquid cooling information page.

I also encourage you to learn more from our new White Paper: Liquid Cooling Technologies for Data Center and Edge Applications and a compelling Schneider Electric blog on five reasons to consider liquid cooling for your data center.

^[*] Gartner, “The Future of Enterprise Data Centers —What’s Next”, Published: 24 April 2019 ID: G00384249

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