In the era of digital economy and Internet of Everything, the calculation and processing of massive data need to continuously expand the infrastructure scale of data centers, which also brings the problem of sharp increase in energy consumption. According to China's "new infrastructure" development research report, by 2025, global data centers will account for the largest share of global energy consumption, up to 33%. In China, the electricity consumption of national data centers has increased by more than 12% for eight consecutive years, and its proportion in the total electricity consumption will continue to increase in the future.
In addition, a large number of data throughput and operations make the data center, as the "brain" of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, face unprecedented energy consumption and heat dissipation challenges. China IDC Industry Development Research Report (20 19-2020) issued by Kezhi Consulting pointed out that with the improvement of computing power of data centers, the biggest capital investment in new data centers is not the building itself, but the equipment cost to ensure power supply and the cooling cost of computer rooms. Therefore, reducing cooling energy consumption and promoting low-carbon operation of data center are the key links to practice the concept of "carbon neutrality".
It is generally believed in the industry that liquid cooling technology is the most reliable and feasible scheme to reduce energy consumption in data centers. He pointed out that high-density computing is promoting the rise of liquid cooling technology in data centers. Liquid cooling is not only a change of cooling mode, but also may change the whole data center ecology.
Therefore, liquid cooling technology has become an important technical trend in the development of global data centers with its advantages of effectively reducing energy consumption, reducing failure rate and breaking through environmental restrictions. At present, international giants such as IBM, Google and Intel have already laid out their plans in this field. In China, technology companies represented by NetScience, Huawei and Zhongke Shuguang are also actively investing in liquid cooling technology research and development and market expansion.
Liquid cooling refers to the technology of using liquid as heat transfer medium to exchange heat with heating elements and then take away heat, instead of indirect cooling through air like air cooling. Liquid has better heat transfer effect, 25 times that of air, and faster and better temperature transfer effect. At the same time, due to the large specific heat capacity of the liquid, its temperature will not change obviously after absorbing a lot of heat, so the CPU temperature can be stabilized. Compared with the air-cooled system, liquid cooling can save energy by about 30%, effectively reducing the energy consumption ratio, and the PUE (index for evaluating the energy efficiency of data center) is reduced to 1.05, which meets the requirements of green data center. In addition, compared with air, the specific heat capacity of liquid is not affected by altitude and air pressure, so the liquid-cooled data center can still maintain high heat dissipation efficiency at high altitude.
More importantly, the liquid-cooled data center can better collect waste heat and create considerable economic value. This is because the uninterrupted operation of data centers often produces huge heat energy. Traditional air-cooled equipment generally discharges heat directly into the atmosphere, while liquid-cooled data center can be directly connected to the building heating system and water supply system through heat exchange to meet the heating and warm water supply needs of residents. This not only saves energy, but also creates added value for the data center.
Hu, vice president of NetScience, said that liquid cooling technology is an effective way to break through the bottleneck of energy saving in data centers, which is well adapted to the current concept of "carbon neutrality" in China and represents the main development direction of green energy saving in data centers in the future.
After years of research and development, the application of liquid cooling technology is becoming more and more mature. For example, NetScience cooperated with Elephant Media to develop a media fusion micro-liquid cooling data center integrating media fusion command system and all-media content production system, which effectively solved the requirements of technical support platform for small space, light weight, low energy consumption, convenience and quickness, and all-media fusion function in the process of media fusion transformation.
"Nethouse is the earliest enterprise in China to lay out the green liquid-cooled data center product line. Has rich experience in landing, and has a good reputation in the industry. These advantages have been valued in our previous market research. " Elephant media related personnel said. According to reports, NetScience has more than 30 core patents for liquid cooling. Judging from the customer solutions currently involved, liquid cooling technology has been well recognized in the heat dissipation practice of data centers.
"In the future, NetScience will continue to invest in the research and development and application of liquid cooling technology to help more data centers achieve energy saving and consumption reduction, and * * * will usher in the era of' carbon neutrality'." Hu said:
(Editor Zhang Wei)