Cooling System

Data Center Cooling System

Data center cooling systems ensure optimal operating temperatures for IT equipment by removing excess heat. Traditional methods include air conditioning, chilled water systems, and more advanced techniques like liquid immersion cooling. These systems are crucial for preventing equipment malfunction, damage, and downtime.

Efficient thermal management strategies reduce overall operation costs. By optimizing cooling system energy costs against computational energy consumption costs, data center operators can minimize operation costs and meet computational performance demands.

Data center cooling design and optimization

Data center cooling isn’t only about installing fans and other coolants. It’s about balancing design and optimization, as well as implementing efficiency and efficacy. Strategic design combined with optimization is crucial for ensuring that data center infrastructure and IT equipment operate at their best. This approach not only prevents IT equipment from overheating but also maximizes the efficient use of data center resources, such as power and cooling systems. By optimizing these elements, data centers can significantly reduce their environmental footprint, leading to more sustainable and cost-effective operations.

Below are some critical factors for optimizing data center performance:

• Configuring hot/cold aisle containment: By configuring server racks in alternating rows — with cold air intakes facing one way and hot air output facing the other — data centers can create hot and cold “corridors.” This maximizes efficiency by ensuring cooled air is where it’s needed most while preventing the hot and cold air from mixing.
• Optimizing airflow management: By optimizing airflow through vents and barriers, data centers can minimize areas of stationary air. Proper airflow management then lowers cooling costs by reducing the need to compensate for warm spots. It also helps ensure that the cooling is constant throughout the facility.
• Working inside safe limits: By adhering to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ (ASHRAE) published guidance, data centers can find and implement temperature standards for safe operating conditions of common equipment. In some cases, maintaining a slightly warmer temperature — when safe — can save considerable energy and costs.
• Preventing downtime: By leaning on IoT devices, ML, and automated systems for help, data centers can spot problems before they happen. Monitoring systems and installing timely patches and upgrades ensure facilities prevent downtime and improve efficiency further.
• Managing humidity control: By managing humidity, data centers can avoid hardware damage and damage to static electricity.

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Data center cooling systems ensure optimal operating temperatures for IT equipment by removing excess heat. Traditional methods include air conditioning, chilled water systems, and more advanced techniques like liquid immersion cooling. These systems are crucial for preventing equipment malfunction, damage, and downtime.

Efficient thermal management strategies reduce overall operation costs. By optimizing cooling system energy costs against computational energy consumption costs, data center operators can minimize operation costs and meet computational performance demands.

How does data center cooling Work?

Data center cooling removes excess heat from the air and replaces it with cooler air. This is typically done in one of several ways:

• Venting hot air outside and bringing outside air in, cooling it and circulating it in the facility.
• Recycling internal air by cooling it, usually through a hot and cold aisle design to maximize cooling efficiency.
• Venting hot air outside and then drawing pre-chilled outside air into the facility to cool it down. This approach is known as free cooling, and it only works for facilities in colder climates.
• Cooling or heating the facility to the highest recommended temperature and replacing equipment once it fails. Using this so-called heat cooling or close-coupled cooling method can be cheaper, as other cooling methods might cost significantly more than equipment replacement costs.

Today: Air cooling efficiency continues to grow

In the years, we’ve seen both raised floor and slab floor design continue to cool data centers successfully. We’ve also seen new developments that have helped make air cooling more efficient in general, to keep up with the growing density of IT workloads.

One example, a new take on the idea of the fan wall design. Cool Array is used as part of an on-slab cold-flooded/hot-aisle containment scheme. It helps customers improve PUE and support very dense air-cooled workloads in the most efficient way possible. As a result, Cool Array can create footprint and fan power benefits that contribute to industry-leading power usage effectiveness (PUE).

Tomorrow: Liquid cooling deployment continues

Liquid cooling systems use coolants that circulate through a pipe network, absorbing heat away from IT equipment. This is especially effective for cooling high-density servers with AI and HPC workloads.

Take power-intensive workloads, such as training deployments, for example. These may require deep learning and generative AI (GenAI) and often require a larger environment to accommodate their size and complexity. By employing the conductive properties of liquids, the data center can quickly move heat away from the servers.

Liquid cooling could completely redefine the density capabilities of data centers, for the simple reason that liquid is significantly better at transferring heat than air is. While it would be wrong to suggest that a high-density data center can’t be solved by air cooling alone, the industry as a whole will be shifting toward greater liquid cooling adoption in the years to come.

 

Liquid cooling offers dual benefits

Liquid cooling systems don’t have to dedicate power to running fans in the same way that air-cooled systems do. For this reason alone, it can offer two distinct benefits:

The system dedicates less power to running server fans, which allows for greater compute power.
The total amount of power dedicated to running fans across the data hall is lower, leading to PUE improvements.
Imagine you have a 40-kW cabinet deployed in a data center. In an air-cooled system, up to 30% of the energy you feed into that cabinet might go to powering the server fans, and would therefore not be apparent in PUE calculations. This means that the actual compute capacity of that cabinet would only represent about 28 kW. In contrast, the same cabinet supported by a liquid cooling system could dedicate as much as 39 kW of its power to compute workloads. In short, liquid cooling allows you to do more with the same power.

Immersion cooling

Immersion cooling directly submerges IT infrastructure components in dielectric fluids that cool by absorbing heat. Servers, which are kept in nonconductive, absorbent fluids, provide effective heat management.

One of the biggest advantages of immersion cooling is that it enables the deployment of ultra-high-density equipment in otherwise low or medium-density facilities, essentially retrofitting the data center for future applications. High-density deployments, like AI and Internet of Things (IoT), are common use cases for the emerging immersion cooling.

Evaporative cooling

Evaporative cooling uses fans to draw outside air in, cooling it before deploying it to cool IT equipment. Through water evaporation, this method draws heat away from the air efficiently.

Depending on the specifics of the deployment, business use case, and location, evaporative cooling may be the right cooling technique. For example, as an alternative to traditional air cooling, and depending on other attributes, evaporative cooling may be appropriate for inferencing deployments.

Free cooling

Cooling data centers using free air bypasses traditional cooling mechanisms when external conditions make it possible. Free cooling capitalizes on external conditions, primarily cooler outside air or water, and typically employs several mechanisms to deliver, including economizers, indirect free air, thermal wheels, and plate-heat exchangers.

While a site’s microclimate will need assessment to initially determine the viability of free cooling with a deployment, with viability ascertained, free air cooling can be one of a risk-adverse and energy-efficient solution for companies looking to minimize the carbon footprint of their data center deployments. This is especially relevant for AI and HPC deployment use cases.

Hybrid cooling strategy

A hybrid cooling approach integrates multiple cooling technologies to optimize thermal management based on specific IT equipment demands.

For example, a facility might combine traditional air cooling with rear-door heat exchangers, where the latter are mounted directly on server racks to absorb heat as it exits the servers. In this setup, ambient air cooling manages the overall rack environment while the rear-door heat exchanger efficiently handles high-density workloads by transferring excess heat (via liquid) away from critical components.