The market for cooling systems for data centers on the threshold of significant changes
Data center cooling is always expensive for data center owners. This is especially important given the emerging high-density physical servers actively used by virtual server (cloud service) providers. A report from Global Market Insights shows that the global market for cooling systems for data centers will reach $ 20 billion by 2024. This is a huge leap, since in 2016 the mark ranged around $ 8 billion. In addition, the data in the report indicate that cooling systems account for an average of approximately 40 percent of total energy consumption.
When deploying a data center ecosystem, there were always 2 main questions: how to use energy efficiently and how to correctly correlate the power consumed by data center equipment with the power used to cool this equipment. The obsession with these problems has reached its climax, but a new difficulty is already looming in the background. While Intel, AMD and other manufacturers of components for data centers are solving the issue of reducing the heat produced by equipment, the density of their servers continues to grow.
The used capacity of the average data center varies within 10 megawatts. However, the density of the racks increases, because At the moment, there is an increase in high-performance computing (HPC) and the use of GPUs is also increasing. Therefore, more and more often the consumed power of data centers reaches 50 MW or more, and this in turn leads to higher temperatures due to equipment operation.
The operation of equipment in a data center is a "hot" process. Central processors produce more and more heat every day, GPUs also do not differ in heat generation and always get very hot during operation, plus the work of a dozen DIMMs on two-part servers also adds to the temperature.
The only equipment working in the opposite direction is storage. The appearance of SSDs and the transition from drives with a frequency of 15,000/10,000 rpm was literally a salvation, because solid-state drives (even if they operate at full power) practically do not generate heat.
There is a clear logical connection in the ecosystem of the data center - the higher the density of servers, the more cooling you will need. However, do not turn your data center into a refrigerator. A striking example of this is the huge fancy eBay data center in Phoenix, in a city that is not famous for its cool summers, the cooling there reaches comfortable temperatures and when you are in it you will not feel the cold penetrating the bones.
In their report, analysts from Global Market Insights noted that along with traditional cooling methods, new technologies, such as liquid cooling, are also widely used. Liquid cooling is still more popular with ordinary users, data centers are slower to adopt this technology because of fear of fluid leakage. Also taking into account the scope of application, the fact that liquid cooling will cost more than air cooling is also taken into account.
But, nevertheless, analysts expect that after some time the demand for liquid cooling technologies will nevertheless show a significant increase, thanks to the use of advanced cooling agents that can provide effective cooling and minimize the total carbon dioxide emission. The liquid provides more efficient cooling than air, which is why this technology is often used in high-performance computers.
It is expected that this technology of cooling data centers and server rooms will show the highest growth rates due to the ability to provide certain conditions for each type of equipment even when located in close proximity to each other, and it will primarily be aimed at server rooms of banks and small data centers for organizations leasing VPS Windows Sevres. Given the visible advantages, we can safely say that this area is simply intended for growth and development.
Global Market Insights also predicts that the IT and telecommunications industry will continue to dominate the data center cooling technology market, as demand for data storage and availability is increasing day by day. This is due to the fact that an increase in the number of smartphones and IoT devices entails an increase in the growth of peripheral networks, which, in turn, will require. And again we return to the logical connection - any growth in equipment will require significant cooling.