Rittal recently developed a modular cooling distribution unit (CDU) with a cooling capacity of more than 1 megawatt. The CDU uses direct liquid cooling based on water, prompting the company to describe it as “a perfect example for new IT infrastructure technologies that are enablers for AI applications.”
Rittal used Open Rack V3 OCP (Open Compute Project) principles as well as modularization to design the CDU so that modules fit to the usual handling of servers, the company further explained.
“Liquid-to-liquid solutions will become more and more the standard, while liquid-to-air solutions will still remain for existing data centers without facility water at row level,” Rittal prognosticated on the outlook for cooling technologies.
“To put the technology into practice, it is not enough to simply provide the cooling capacity and integrate the solution into the facility, which also still poses challenges,” said Lars Platzhoff, head of Rittal’s cooling solutions business unit, when the company announced the CDU. “Despite the new technology, the solutions must remain manageable by the data center team as part of the usual service. At best, this should be taken into account already at the design stage.
“The approaches taken by international hyperscalers after extensive testing will quite probably set the standards in the medium term,” Platzhoff continued. “But the agile colocation sector cannot wait so long.”
Most colos, Rittal pointed out, are highly customer-focused and want to rapidly offer their customers good conditions for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC). “Several of them are also planning data centers with liquid-to-liquid solutions,” the company added. “Rittal will also offer alternatives without the need for a water connection. The liquid-to-air versions cool the processors with water but dissipate the heat into the air through the rear door of the rack or a side cooler. They do not achieve the same cooling output and efficiency as liquid-to-liquid solutions, but they can be deployed more quickly in data centers without a water connection. Thus, they enable data center operators to perform their tests with less effort and investment or to create individual HPC islands in air-cooled data centers for their users.”
You can find out more about Rittal’s data center cooling solutions here.
