Equinix, a leading global digital infrastructure company, today announced that it would expand support for advanced liquid cooling technologies, such as direct-to-chip cooling, to more than 100 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers. These facilities are located in over 45 metros around the world including London, Washington D.C, Singapore, etc.
In a statement, Equinix explained, “Direct-to-chip is a unique approach that involves a cold plate sitting on top of the chip inside the server. The cold plate is enabled with liquid supply and return channels, allowing technical cooling fluid to run through the plate, drawing heat away from the chip. This allows direct-to-chip-enabled servers to be installed in a standard IT cabinet just like legacy air-cooled equipment, even while being cooled in an innovative way. Rear-door heat exchangers use a cooling coil and fans to capture heat from air cooled IT equipment. They are mounted directly onto customer cabinets, so are able to manage higher cooling loads than conventional cooling.”
“Liquid cooling was front and center in our development of the Open19 V2 specification. The goal of the Open19 project, which operates under the Linux Foundation, was to create an open standard that can fit any 19″ rack for server, storage, and networking,” said My Truong, SSIA Chairperson and Field CTO for Equinix. “The project enables digital leaders to use hardware from a diverse set of vendors efficiently and sustainably in any datacenter environment. Equinix’s technology and vendor neutral approach to liquid cooling is a mechanism to remove the friction of deploying advanced liquid cooling solutions in enterprise data centers.”
The move will enable it to better maintain high-density hardware deployed for compute-intensive workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI). “We have seen an increase in demand for data-intensive and high-compute applications like AI,” said Sean Graham, Research Director, Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends at IDC. “The hardware required to run these new applications is pushing up densities inside data centers and can no longer be efficiently cooled by traditional techniques. We are seeing a growing demand for liquid-cooled solutions from enterprises, and it is essential that data center providers, like Equinix, can support this next generation of cooling solutions.”
*Feature image: Screengrab from Equinix video feature on Liquid Cooling.