Global data center power consumption accounts for about 2% of the world’s total power consumption, the rise of AI and other high-performance computing business is making this share continue to climb.
100% of IT hardware energy consumption is converted into heat, traditional cooling methods are extremely high energy consumption (accounting for more than 50% of the total energy consumption of the data center), bringing pressure on sustainable development, and liquid-cooled container technology, with the advantages of modularity, high energy-efficiency, and fast deployment, has become the next generation of data center cooling core solutions.
The liquid-cooled container technology, with its modularity, high energy efficiency and fast deployment, has become the core solution for next-generation data center cooling.
Bottlenecks and Limitations of Traditional Data Center Cooling
Over the past half century, mainstream data centers have generally adopted a raised floor + air-cooled solution to achieve cooling through CRAC/CRAH units with fixed-speed fans. In the era of low arithmetic density and energy efficiency is not the primary goal, this system can still meet the demand, but the shortcomings have become increasingly prominent:
- PUE is generally higher than 2.0, and energy consumption is severely wasted
- The top and bottom of the cabinet have obvious temperature stratification, and the top equipment runs at high temperatures for a long time.
- Airflow short-circuiting, hot and cold air mixing, further lowering the cooling efficiency
Despite the subsequent emergence of hot and cold channel isolation, precision cooling between columns, variable frequency fans, natural cooling and other optimization programs, but still limited by the physical bottleneck of low heat capacity and low thermal conductivity of the air itself.
In addition, traditional cooling is also faced with the dilemma of water resources and energy consumption: cooling towers consume large amounts of water, dry cooling systems increase power consumption, and fresh air cooling, although the PUE is close to the ideal value, is subject to humidity, dust and other constraints, and security is inadequate. In the face of the AI era, the power of a single cabinet is rising, and the traditional air-cooled has been unsustainable.
What Is Liquid Cooled Containers Technology?
Liquid-cooled container is the deep integration of liquid-cooled solution + modular data center, which highly integrates cold plate/submerged liquid-cooled system, IT equipment, power supply and distribution, monitoring, fire protection and other infrastructure in a standard container, forming a factory prefabricated, plug-and-play integrated solution.
It inherits the core advantage of efficient heat dissipation of liquid cooling, but also has the characteristics of modularization, mobility, and fast deployment, which is the key path to cope with the explosion of arithmetic power and tight energy consumption.
Its core operating logic is clear and easy to understand, as follows:
- Specialized insulating coolant (such as silicone oil, glycol aqueous solution) is transported through a closed closed loop circuit, adhering to the CPU, GPU and other core chips, and rapidly absorbing heat by virtue of better-than-air thermal conductivity to avoid overheating damage to the hardware and to protect the chips from normal operation.
- The heat-absorbing high-temperature coolant is discharged through the heat exchange system in the container, which can be docked to the waste heat recovery device for heating and other scenarios, enhancing energy utilization and helping data center low-carbon operation.
- The system is equipped with an intelligent monitoring system, which collects operating parameters and monitors the status of the equipment in real time, triggers an early warning interlock in case of abnormality, and ensures the long-term stable and efficient operation of the system through automated adjustment.
At present, it is mainly divided into two technical routes: cold plate liquid-cooled containers and submerged liquid-cooled containers.
Liquid-cooled Container Technology Architecture
Cold Plate Liquid-cooled Container
Cold plate program compatibility, low transformation difficulty, is the current mainstream landing form, according to the integration level can be divided into three categories:
Cabinet level integration
Core components such as cooling distribution unit (CDU), piping, circulation pumps, etc. are deeply integrated with the liquid-cooled cabinet to create an independent and complete refrigeration unit. With a high degree of modularity, it can flexibly realize capacity expansion, transportation and operation and maintenance, and meet the flexible deployment requirements of various scenarios.
Row-level integration
CDUs are centrally deployed at the end or in the middle of a row of cabinets to provide cooling services for the entire row of cabinets. This can effectively improve equipment utilization, reduce the cooling cost of a single cabinet, especially suitable for the limited space layout of the container, to achieve the double optimization of space and energy efficiency.
Room-level integration
Applicable to large container data centers, using a centralized large CDU, through a dedicated piping system for all cabinets in the box unified cooling. This method is convenient for centralized management and operation and maintenance, but it puts forward higher requirements for pipeline design, construction technology and temperature control precision.
Submerged Liquid Cooling Container
Submerged liquid cooling relies on the special submerged tank and box transformation, the core features:
- The box body has been strengthened with load-bearing treatment, which can stably carry the overall weight of the coolant and IT equipment and guarantee the safety of the structure.
- The inner wall of the case is treated with professional leakage prevention and corrosion prevention, effectively avoiding the risk of coolant leakage and extending the service life of the equipment.
- Highly integrated cooling distribution unit (CDU), valve group, intelligent monitoring and fire-fighting system, realizing integrated and efficient control.
- A single 40-foot container can support ultra-high density deployments of hundreds of kW to meet the demands of extreme computing power scenarios.
Higher heat dissipation efficiency makes it more suitable for supercomputing, AI clusters and other extreme computing scenarios.
Intelligent Monitoring and Security
Liquid-cooled containers are equipped with a complete intelligent control system:
- Real-time temperature, flow rate and pressure monitoring: high-precision collection of the core operating parameters of the coolant, capturing subtle changes in the parameters, providing support for system regulation and fault prediction, and guaranteeing that the system is in the best operating state.
- Leakage detection and multiple redundancy design: Equipped with high-precision leakage sensors to quickly identify leaks and warnings; multiple redundancy design, seamless switching of standby units in case of failure, avoiding system shutdown and ensuring operational safety.
- Automatic adjustment of pump speed, flow rate and heat dissipation strategy: based on real-time monitoring data, the intelligent algorithm automatically regulates the operating parameters, dynamically adapts to the changes in equipment heating, and takes into account the cooling effect and energy-saving requirements.
- Failure warning and safety interlock: When monitoring the abnormalities, trigger a graded warning and push information, and at the same time start emergency interlock measures to prevent the expansion of failures and protect equipment and system safety.
The Importance of Container Liquid Cooling Solutions
Excellent Heat Dissipation Efficiency
Liquid-cooled container cooling efficiency compared to traditional air-cooled to achieve a leap forward, relying on the excellent thermal conductivity of the liquid far beyond the air, can be directly on the core components of the IT equipment, efficiently take away the operating heat, from the root to solve the problem of local overheating.
The power of a single cabinet can reach 10kW-20kW, which can accurately adapt to high-performance and high-density load scenarios such as AI, HPC, etc., and effectively guarantee the stable operation of hardware under high-load conditions, avoiding performance degradation or equipment damage caused by overheating.
Remarkable Energy-saving Effect
Liquid-cooled containers can significantly optimize the core energy efficiency index PUE of data centers, of which the PUE of the cold plate liquid-cooled solution is as low as 1.05, and the submerged liquid-cooled solution can be reduced to less than 1.03, infinitely close to the ideal value of 1.0.
By reducing the energy loss in the cooling process, more power is directly put into the computing power output, which can effectively reduce the long-term operating costs of enterprises and help data centers achieve low-carbon operations, in line with the global dual-carbon development goals.
High Deployment Efficiency
Adopting the modularized design of factory prefabrication and on-site splicing, all core components are integrated, debugged and tested in the factory, and can be quickly put into operation after arriving at the site by simply completing the pipeline connection and power access, with the fastest time to achieve on-line operation of 8-10 days.
This significantly shortens the data center construction cycle and enables the company to quickly respond to urgent needs such as capacity expansion and temporary capacity replenishment, which improves the efficiency of project implementation and capital turnover.
Highly Flexible Deployment
With the core characteristics of modularity and mobility, liquid-cooled containers completely get rid of the harsh requirements of traditional data centers on the site, and can be flexibly deployed on the rooftop of buildings, in basements, in remote areas and other complex scenarios, without the need to build a high-standard server room and without the need to carry out complex site modification.
It can accurately adapt to edge computing, temporary arithmetic supply and other diversified scene requirements, effectively realizing the core objective of “arithmetic power everywhere” and providing flexible support for various arithmetic applications.
Low Carbon and Environmentally Friendly
In addition to its own excellent energy-saving characteristics, the liquid-cooled container can efficiently recover the waste heat generated by the liquid-cooled system and use it for district heating, industrial heat preservation and other scenarios, realizing “waste heat reuse” and significantly improving the comprehensive energy utilization rate.
It helps data centers break the shackles of high energy consumption and accelerate the transformation to a low-emission, recyclable green operation mode, which deeply fits the global green and low-carbon development trend and injects core power for the sustainable development of data centers.
Outstanding Space Utilization Rate
Taking standard containers as carriers, through scientific optimization of internal layout, the liquid cooling system, IT equipment and various infrastructures are highly integrated without taking up redundant space, and the density of arithmetic power per unit volume far exceeds that of traditional civil engineering server rooms.
In urban areas where land resources are scarce and site rental costs remain high, it can maximize the output of computing power in limited sites, effectively compressing the operating costs of enterprise sites and highlighting its core advantage of space utilization.
Applications of Integrated Liquid Cooled Containers
Expansion and New Construction of Large Data Centers
In the face of the arithmetic expansion and energy consumption pressure brought by AI and other businesses, liquid-cooled containers can be used as a new core module or as a supplement to the expansion of the existing server room without large-scale construction, which can improve the arithmetic density of a single cabinet and reduce PUE to less than 1.05, and help data centers develop efficiently, greenly and on a large scale, which is in line with the goal of dual-carbon.
AI and High-performance Computing HPC Cluster
The core chips of HPC scenarios run at high load for a long time and have high heat flow density, which makes it difficult to control the temperature with traditional air-cooling.
Liquid-cooled containers can meet the heat dissipation needs of ultra-high-power consumption chips with excellent heat dissipation, avoiding equipment frequency reduction and downtime, and providing reliable arithmetic support for scientific research, AI research and development, and other high-end fields.
5G Communication and Edge Computing
5G base stations and edge nodes have complex deployment scenarios, with high requirements on equipment size, reliability and deployment speed. Liquid-cooled containers are compact, movable, and do not require a high-standard server room, so they can be deployed quickly to ensure the stability of 5G signals and low-latency response of edge computing.
Emergency and Temporary Computing Power
Disaster relief, large-scale events and other scenarios require the rapid construction of temporary computing power, and the site is complex and time-critical. Liquid-cooled containers can be prefabricated in factories and put online in 8-10 days at the earliest, without complicated modifications, and can be deployed flexibly, solving the problems of long deployment cycle and poor adaptability of traditional computing power.
Challenges and Considerations
Despite the significant advantages, liquid-cooled containers still need attention in landing:
- The complexity of the preliminary system design and installation is higher than that of air-cooled, requiring a professional team: liquid-cooled containers are not simply spliced together, and the design needs to combine various factors and integrate technologies from multiple fields, and the installation process requires precision, so it is necessary to rely on a professional team to ensure that the design is scientific and the installation is standardized.
- Regular maintenance of core components is required: the long-term use of coolant is prone to performance degradation, piping may be aging and loose, heat exchangers are prone to accumulation of clogging, regular inspection, cleaning and maintenance are required to ensure the long-term efficient and stable operation of the system.
- There is a potential risk of liquid leakage, high requirements for materials, technology and safety design: liquid leakage will lead to system failure, equipment damage and safety hazards, the need to use special sealing corrosion-resistant materials, strict control of the construction process, supporting the perfect design of liquid leakage detection and emergency response.
- Part of the old hardware is not compatible with liquid cooling, the transformation needs to assess the cost: the old hardware is not adapted to liquid cooling design, the transformation needs to be disassembled and modified or even replace the components, the enterprise needs to comprehensively assess the compatibility of the transformation costs and benefits, to develop a reasonable transformation program.
However, as the technology matures and standardization advances, these problems are gradually being solved.
Future development trend of liquid-cooled containers
Accompanied by the popularity of AI and high-density computing, it will become a standard solution for data centers.
- Towards greater intelligence: relying on AI technology to realize autonomous system regulation, predictive maintenance, and building a digital control system for the whole chain to improve operational efficiency and ease of operation and maintenance.
- Continuous upgrading of materials and processes: Iteratively optimize core materials and construction processes, promote product upgrading in the direction of safer, lighter, more corrosion-resistant and lower cost, and lower the threshold for landing.
- Deep integration into the regional energy system: Promote the in-depth linkage between liquid-cooled containers and the regional energy network, realizing the zero-carbon energy closed loop of “data center + cogeneration”, and assisting in the realization of the dual-carbon goal.
- Promote standardization, modularization and batch production: through standardized design, modular integration and batch manufacturing, further optimize the total life cycle cost (TCO) and enhance market penetration.
Conclusion
Traditional air-cooled has been difficult to support the energy consumption and density requirements of next-generation data centers, liquid-cooled containers are completely reshaping the construction and operation mode of data centers by virtue of their high energy efficiency, fast deployment, high flexibility and strong sustainability.
It is not only a cooling technology upgrade, but also a key support for data centers to become low-carbon, modular, intelligent and ubiquitous. Driven by the global arithmetic power explosion and the dual-carbon target, liquid-cooled containers will surely become the mainstream choice of data center infrastructure in the future, leading the industry into a new era of development.
