Sydney lab showcases liquid cooling for data centres

Data centres consume approximately 1% of all electricity generated globally, or about 200 terawatt hours per year. Much of this power consumption comes from cooling and environmental control requirements, as the server CPU and GPUs used for cloud computing generate large amounts of heat. As server chips become more powerful in coming years, the energy needed to cool them will also increase.

In order to address this issue, Australian-owned and -operated cloud service provider ResetData has opened a test and simulation lab for its liquid-cooled data centre server technology in the Sydney CBD.

Operated in collaboration with infrastructure from Dell Technologies and Intel, it is one of the first facilities in the Asia–Pacific region capable of testing and simulating workloads in a liquid-cooled environment, allowing local businesses to access more sustainable, high-performance infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for demanding applications including artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Traditional data centres use air cooling, requiring high-performance air conditioning to maintain an optimum temperature. Those data centres also consume large amounts of water as part of their operation.

ResetData uses immersion cooling, which suspends the server racks and their processors in liquid. By using liquid cooling, the company reportedly delivers an approximate 45% reduction in CO₂ emissions as well as an estimated 40% reduction in overall cloud cooling computing costs to end users compared to traditional air-cooled data centres.

“The reality is, traditional data centres consume a lot more energy than they should,” said ResetData co-founder and Managing Director Bass Salah.

“By working with high-performance technology providers such as Dell Technologies and Intel, we are developing the next generation of data centre technology at our test and simulation lab. We’re able to showcase how the partnership between the technology and cooling system uses far less power and water than traditional solutions, yet is still able to meet customer needs for high-performance cloud workloads, like artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

According to ResetData, liquid cooling has the additional benefit of reducing the overall size of the data centre due to the efficiency of the cooling technology. This leads to lower real estate expenditure and allows data centres to be located in places not otherwise suitable for traditional data centre infrastructure.

Image caption: ResetData co-founders Marcel Zalloua and Bass Salah at the ResetData Test Lab.