FEATURE: EDGE COMPUTING
THESE NEW EDGE ENVIRONMENTS
WILL NOT BE UNIFORM IN NATURE, BUT
COMMON TO ALL WILL BE THE NEED TO
KEEP THE IT EQUIPMENT COOL.
for installing, operating and supporting
Edge Compute solutions.
Much new Edge IT is being built using
industry standard technologies housed
in small, non-IT dedicated ruggedised
enclosures in often hostile locations.
IT equipment designed to live in clean rooms
and controlled environments will be exposed
to huge temperature variations, airborne
contaminants, humidity and other factors
such as the need for noise control. Power
and water supply constraints are additional
factors to consider.
These requirements cannot be met
through traditional air cooling. Instead
these distributed environments are ideally
suited to the use of immersive liquid
cooling solutions.
Liquid cooling technology has advanced
to the point where it is a viable solution for
demand and supply side players grappling
with the commercial, logistical, support and
sustainability imperatives for installation
and maintenance of hundreds or thousands
of servers.
Liquid cooling moves to the Edge
Liquid cooling of IT equipment has been
used for decades in mainframe and other
high-performance environments. What
is new is the use of the immersive liquid
cooling in distributed IT at the edge of the
network where the separation of the server
from the environment is a key advantage.
Edge uses are behind much of the projected
market growth forecasts for liquid cooling
solutions. To this end, market projections
point to immersion cooling market growth
from US$177 million in 2019 to US$501
million by 2024, at a CAGR of 23.2% from
2019 to 2024.
How liquid lowers Edge
operating costs
A key requirement of Edge Computing roll
outs will be low operating costs. In Edge
deployments, immersive liquid cooling is
known to provide dramatic energy saving
benefits. Through the elimination of the
need for air-cooling infrastructure such
as fans, air channels and filters, liquid
cooling technologies promise reduction in
energy and water consumption, delivering
significant cost savings.
Liquid cooling uses five-times less energy
than air cooling with obvious environmental
and cost benefits. In chassis-level liquid
cooling solutions, all server fans are removed
and precision delivery technologies using
natural or forced convection are used to cool
both bespoke and standard IT deployments.
This delivers 1,000-times the capacity to
remove heat from electronics compared to
the most efficient air-cooling solutions.
A key consideration is the maintenance and
monitoring of multiple Edge deployments
– end-user companies will not want to
be exposed to the high maintenance
costs associated with large teams of field
engineers being dispatched to perform
equipment servicing or to replace worn parts.
With no moving parts, immersive cooling
technology removes the need for intrusive
maintenance and its related downtime.
The reliability and no-touch features of
liquid cooling solutions will match the needs
for extended mean time to maintenance
and longer intervention intervals needed
for viable operation and management of
remotely located equipment.
One historic concern related to immersive
cooling was corrosion, because of the
use of natural oils. There are a number of
companies that have addressed this through
various alternative liquid cooling technology.
Some processes isolate the power-hungry
and heat-generating processors and directly
cool it, while others are 100% sealed to
avoid contamination and offering cooling to
all the electronics in server equipment using
specially engineered dielectric fluid.
Another environmental factor is noise. Many
deployments to support 5G are likely to be
44 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com