Small Cooling Systems: Assessing the Options for Edge Data Centers

Proper cooling is crucial to the operation of IT equipment, including servers, storage, and networking devices. As more companies undergo digital transformation, they need edge data centers that include robust, reliable compute resources located close to where data is being generated and processed.

Edge computing is the concept of having compute and storage capacity close to where users are generating, consuming and manipulating data. Internet of Things (IoT) applications, for example, involve devices and sensors generating significant amounts of data at the network edge that must then be processed. The latency involved in sending it to a centralized or cloud data center is too great, driving the need for localized processing capabilities. Healthcare, factory floor machine control and “smart city” applications including autonomous vehicles are just a few examples of applications driving demand for edge computing and, hence, edge data centers.