Handling the heat - Park Place Technologies launches a comprehensive range of new Liquid Cooling services for data centres

Liquid cooling for computers is not exactly a new idea …think of the top end IBM System/360 Model 91 from 1966 and, more recently, some power-hungry gaming PCs. (My niece, the tech journalist, editor and commentator, Kate Bevan owned a water cooled one that, light heartedly she claimed, dimmed the lights in her neighbourhood when she turned it on.) Even full immersion of servers in a dielectric liquid first saw the light of day about 10 years ago. But, up to now it has very much been a niche requirement for certain High-Performance Compute (HPC) configurations. So why is liquid cooling getting such attention now, and, if you are running a data centre or a server room, what should you be doing about it?

The very simplistic answer to “why now”, is AI. Looking back 15 years or so, there was a concern in large data centres about rack densities growing beyond 5 to 10 kw/h per rack, up to 15 kw/h. This was more a power availability concern within older data centres rather than a cooling issue. In any case we weren’t seeing rack densities increasing rapidly. Data centres with CRAC units (Computer Room Air Conditioning) was and remains the most used solution to cooling the space. But with, initially, bitcoin mining and highly graphical multi-player on-line gaming, rack densities moved towards 20kw/h. The rapid increase in AI LLM (Large Language Models) training and on-going deployment of AI based applications has already pushed rack densities well beyond that point and the latest Nvidia Blackwell processors each have a potential power draw of 1200 watts each, which could see rack densities exceeding 100kw/h. At that point you would need gale force, chilled winds inside the data centre to keep the servers cool. Clearly, that is not an option from either a power usage or noise point of view.

Current air-cooled servers have all of the heat removed with banks of high velocity fans but are struggling to keep up with newer higher power systems. Liquids are far more effective coolants than air. At present, air cooling technology only captures 30% of the heat generated by the servers, compared to the 100% captured by total immersion cooling. Liquid actually provides 24+ times better thermal conductivity compared to water. An alternative to total liquid immersion, such as Direct-to-chip (DTC) cooling is very effective at cooling the CPU or GPU, but does not capture other sources of heat, so, for example, internal fans are still needed. There are other technologies using liquid such as rear-door heat exchangers that work in conjunction with existing air-cooling systems that are simpler first steps in addressing growing cooling challenges.

Evaporative cooling using CRACs consumes a surprisingly large amount of water. According to research undertaken at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States, a mid-size data centre use approximately 300,000 litres of water a day. That equates to the average water use of about 1,000 U.S. homes. So, there are both water and power usage concerns that need to be addressed when considering new liquid cooling solutions. On top of that, you also need to look at the costs and space challenges of retrofitting liquid cooling technologies into existing facilities.

In having a quick look at the offerings and positioning of vendors in this space, I was somewhat concerned that most of them were tied to one or other of the different liquid cooling approaches, and that their marketing material tended to focus on their benefits and the potential disadvantages of other approaches in a somewhat ‘one-eyed’ and narrowly focused manner.

So it was with great interest that I met up on-line with Chris Carreiro, Chief Technology Officer at Park Place Technologies, to hear about the launch of its new Liquid Cooling services offering. I have been following and interacting with Park Place Technologies for the last 5 years. It is now the largest third-party maintenance (TPM) company in the world but has also evolved rapidly into a more rounded data centre and network optimisation organisation, and this announcement fits nicely into that positioning. Its service offer includes the whole cycle from initial procurement, through installation, implementation, monitoring and management to asset disposal if required. Interestingly they will advise on and implement retrofitting of servers to accommodate single or 2-phase DTC implementations. While Park Place Technologies has existing relationships with ZutaCore, for 2-phase DTC that cools with heat-transfer fluid, which boils out, is condensed and cycled back through the system, and Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) for full immersion cooling, it is capable of, and happy working with a range of different vendor solutions.

Customers will have flexibility of choice, but also, importantly, impartial advice and guidance on the best fit of technologies for the customer’s use case. Let’s face it, unless you are building a completely new data centre and installing the latest range of servers, then there will be some significant trade-off decisions to be made. These will revolve around various space, power and water restrictions, along with more complex capital (capex) and operational (opex) cost comparisons. In a greenfield scenario for a 2-phase DTC solution v an air-cooled solution, covering 700 servers that absolutely need liquid cooling, Park Place Technologies claim a 20% reduction in initial capex and a 37% saving on opex over 3 years. In an existing facility, with a mix of sever technologies and existing investments in air cooling, the actual solution and associated calculations on return on investment are not likely to be as straightforward.

Park Place Technologies has a very strong focus on the customer and also a very focused and inclusive approach to employee relations that has stood it in good stead as it has grown and acquired companies around the globe and managed the transfer of employees with minimal churn. It also has a very active Customer Advisory Board that I have had the privilege of interacting with and that gives me the confidence to say that I think this launch of liquid cooling services will be a significant help for customers looking to navigate the journey away from air cooling and towards liquid cooling.