An updated The Green Grid (TGG) tool promises to boost datacentre power consumption by 50% by allowing analysts to evaluate the trade-offs and potential ROI before any major datacentre design and build.
With the risk that higher demand for compute-intensive applications will out-pace energy efficiency services, traditional datacentres have been transitioning towards more sustainable methods like liquid cooling. In 2017, Andre Eriksen, CEO of Danish direct liquid cooling (DLC) company Asetek, told Bloomberg, “In the longer perspective, I believe that datacentres will be liquid cooled.”
TGG updated its Total Cost of Ownership Calculation Tool – dubbed ‘tggTCO’ – to demonstrate how different liquid cooling methods impact a datacentre’s financial and operational ROI. In a statement, Erica Thomas, director of TGG said: “as datacentres grow rapidly, access to the most efficient best practices for their performance is an important element to enable industry innovation.”
DATACENTRE COOLING FUTURE IS LIQUID
Almost two-thirds of US datacentres experience higher peak demands, with a power density of around 15-16 kW/rack. A multi-dimensional, data-driven approach to climate-conscious cooling minimises net-climate impact. In 2021, water cooling helped Google reduce the energy-related carbon footprint of its datacentre portfolio by roughly 300,000 tons of CO2 according to a report by Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of Google’s technical infrastructure. Google is investing in technologies to help reduce energy and water consumption. In 2021, Google’s global datacentre fleet consumed 16.3 billion litres of water.
Vendors other than TGG are enhancing their remote-management solutions to improve datacentre energy efficiency. In February, QTS DataCentre announced a 3-in-1 integrated monitoring system to augment its Service Delivery Platform.
According to a recent DataCentre Thermal Management Market Analysis from London-based Omdia, revenue for the liquid-cooling market could top US$3 billion by 2026, with 50% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Despite this advancement, liquid-cooling isn’t universal, according to Dr. Moises Levy, senior principal analyst for datacentre power and cooling at Omdia, who qualified: “Liquid-cooling systems may or may not be the ideal solution for a datacentre. The selection of liquid-cooling instead of air-cooling systems has to do with various factors, including specific location, climate (temperature/humidity), power densities, workloads, efficiency, performance, heat reuse, and physical space availability.”
Still, liquid-cooling promises to address many of the challenges that come with air-cooling systems, especially as computing densities increase. Long proven for mainframe and gaming applications, liquid-cooling is expanding to protect rack-mounted servers in datacentres around the world = particularly true as extreme weather and heat waves are expected to happen more frequently in the years to come.
For example, last year UK hit 104℉, crippling datacentres and crashing Google’s and Oracle’s cooling systems, while Twitter’s Sacramento datacentre region lost power due to the extreme heat.
DATACENTRES ON HIGH ALERT
Microsoft is introducing sustainability efforts including water-cooling and temperature management at its datacentres, planning to reduce water-use in the centres’ day-to-day operations by 95% by 2024.
Commenting on the initiative, Microsoft’s corporate VP cloud operations and innovation, Noelle Walsh said: “Our latest research in liquid-cooling addresses overclocking, or operating chip components beyond their pre-defined voltage, thermal, and power-design limits to further improve performance. Based on our tests, we’ve found that, for some chipsets, the performance can increase by 20% using liquid-cooling.”
The US is also pushing for datacentre efficiency and sustainability. In late 2022, the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced up to $42 million in funding to help develop high-performance energy-efficient datacentres cooling solutions as part of the Biden administration’s goals to reach net-zero carbon emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.
Financial Push for Datacentre Energy Consumption
As governments and investors push to make datacentres greener, we should anticipate more web-based tools. Investors attracted to sustainability bet on assets meeting green expectations, especially when placing capital for the long-term.
Climate-conscious cooling, more efficient IT equipment, smart and connected equipment, and green building standards are some ways datacentres are becoming more environmentally friendly, according to Omdia.
While tggTCO can be used by datacentre owners and operators to determine which cooling technologies – some companies are already changing and experimenting with – cost-effective builds for their datacentres.
A Microsoft experiment to assess the feasibility of underwater datacentres proved successful, with seawater acting as a coolant rather than traditional air-conditioning on land. China has since launched its own underwater datacentre.