The surge in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads is driving up energy consumption and heat loads, exceeding air-cooling solutions’ capabilities. Data centers are under mounting pressure to innovate and find cost-effective strategies to meet business demands.
Data centers can leverage existing solutions and technologies to retrofit current cooling infrastructures. One approach is integrating liquid-to-refrigerant coolant distribution units (L2R CDUs) with refrigerant-based heat rejection units to provide a versatile and modular solution for liquid cooling deployments.
Our eBook lays out a faster path to deploying liquid-cooled AI solutions with a strategic approach that:
- Offers flexibility and efficiency: Leveraging direct expansion (DX) heat rejection, CDUs allow data centers to manage varying heat loads easily and add new pods as needed, enabling an optimal balance for air and liquid cooling solutions. This modular approach with liquid-to-refrigerant (L2R) CDUs allows for scalable capacity expansion and mitigates the need for infrastructure overhauls.
- Enables versatility for workload management and cost-effectivity: This modular retrofit approach allows for phased deployments as liquid cooling capacity can be turned on as needed by swapping out air-cooling capacity for new CDUs. Moreover, it enables operators to process different workloads at the same facility.
- Highlights innovation with energy efficiency: CDUs provide liquid cooling directly to cold plates on servers or rear door heat exchangers (RDHXs), allowing for higher temperature operations and reduced energy consumption.