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This week we are taking a look at data centres, one of the key infrastructure elements enabling the digital economy and the challenges they create and face. In recent years, the global datacentre industry has been one of the fastest-growing technology driven industries. Examining trends in emerging technologies such as AI, data analytics, VR, IoT, and advanced cloud services, it is safe to assume that this demand for datacentres will only increase over the years.
Problem Statement: From an environmental perspective, this growth will naturally lead to increased energy usage and CO2 emissions in the future. On the other side, datacentres themselves are faced with multiple challenges such as boundaries in regards to floorspace, complexity and cost of build, access to energy, and cooling costs.
Scope for Innovation:“Cooling” is where a lot of cost improvements can be made, as this accounts for 30% to 50% of all the energy consumption in data centres. Therefore, different types of solutions have been developed to address this issue such as air to air heat-exchange, optimization of the cold air needed in a data room, optimization of the temperature in the data room, and manipulation of the cooling capabilities of water evaporation in different ways to cool the air whenever necessary. Our solution of the week, Asperitas, has developed their solution based on total liquid cooling, in other words, immersion cooling.
Solution of the Week – Asperitas: Founded in 2014, this clean and high-tech Dutch company, provides plug and play immersion cooling solutions for cloud service providers, enterprise IT, emerging tech developers, and HPC datacentres.
Why This Matters: The unique technology embraces the most efficient model for operating IT, total liquid cooling or immersion cooling, which reduces the energy footprint of IT by eliminating overhead energy. Furthermore, they enables highly flexible opportunities, the ability to adapt next-generation hardware components, and drastic simplification of datacentre design.
Winner – Shell New Energy Challenge 2018: Their award-winning technology paired with their focus on reliability, security, and efficiency has led to a successful partnership with Shell as part of the New Energy Challenge of 2018, where Asperitas were adjudged the winner and recieved investment from Shell Ventures. Their combined efforts have led to a technology that recently landed an immersion cooling deal with French Bank Crédit Agricole.
Register for the final livestream of the New Energy Challenge on November 19 here