Industry’s first integrated rack with immersed, liquid-cooled IT

Schneider Electric, with Avnet and Iceotope, has created the industry’s first commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. Optimised for compute-intensive applications, the solution combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope’s liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. Avnet integrates the liquid-cooled server with Schneider Electric’s NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system for simple deployment into data centres or edge computing environments. The system is EcoStruxure™ Readysince the solution is available with next generation data centre management software, EcoStruxure IT Expert and our digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor.  The joint solution was unveiled at the Schneider Electric booth (#510) at Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas.

This first-of-its-kind liquid-cooled solution is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, where high compute demands more energy use. In a recent report published by Gartner, liquid cooling was identified as a technology to watch. Analyst Henrique Cecci advised data centre operators “maximise cooling energy efficiencies by employing modern liquid cooling solutions.” Liquid cooling offers greater efficiency, lower operating costs, smaller footprint, increased reliability, and nearly silent operation despite the high-power density of the GPUs. Avnet, Iceotope, and Schneider Electric plan to expand the offering as demand grows by welcoming other server OEMs into the partnership. 

“Schneider Electric is committed to making data centres more sustainable and liquid cooling is a very compelling approach,” said Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation, Secure Power, Schneider Electric, who is presenting on liquid cooling at the Gartner conference. “This latest development marks a significant step toward industrialising chassis-based immersion solutions which offer the efficiency and effectiveness of tanks based solutions while providing the compatibility and serviceability of more traditional, ‘direct-to-chip’ liquid-cooling designs.  Given the growth of compute-intensive applications, we believe this approach is very promising.”

Adapting to changing markets, trends, and technologies

“As a leading global technology solutions provider, Avnet has always exceled at adapting to changing markets, trends, and technologies,” said Scott MacDonald, global president, Avnet Integrated. “We do well at this by partnering with the world’s best technology designers and hardware manufacturers. In this case, we’re partnering with liquid cooling-specialist, Iceotope, and global infrastructure giant, Schneider Electric, to make the best possible liquid cooling solutions for our customers. We’re excited to integrate, fulfill, and support this solution that smartly addresses customer cooling challenges around rising chip densities, harsh IT environments, rising energy costs, water use restrictions, and space constraints.”  

“Iceotope is thrilled to be making its innovative chassis-level, immersive liquid cooling technology available to the general market,” said David Craig, CEO of Iceotope. “We offer the only liquid cooling tech that scales easily from edge computing devices to large server farms in the cloud. And compared to direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems, our approach is more efficient, more reliable, saves more space, eliminates fans, and when deployed across the data centre, it lowers cost.”