Dalrada collaborates with Lenovo and Iceotope to supply liquid-cooled servers with heat recovery

Author: Beatrice

Dalrada has announced that it is collaborating with Lenovo for its computing power and Iceotope to provide a 360º solution to overcome environmental concerns, high energy and cost issues of water consumption with data centres and uses including cryptocurrency mining. Dalrada believes that heat recovery options are a new opportunity for data centres. Exporting excess high-grade ‘heat’ to district heating networks creates an additional income stream with optimised technology engineered for cooling data centres. Likido AD absorption chillers result in ultra-low power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratios. 

The Likido-Lenovo-Iceotope collaboration offers the next generation of low-carbon, HFC-free, ultra-low PUE, fully-encapsulated liquid-cooled rack-mounted servers with heat recovery for district heating and other heating applications.

Data centres are the factories of the digital age. Storing, moving, processing, and analysing data requires cooling energy – and a lot of it. A typical university data centre uses approximately 600-750kW/hour of cooling. This energy is lost to the atmosphere in most data centres as waste heat without recovery.  

Edge of network data handling for artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, and data visualisation further increases servers’ energy consumption and cooling demand. For example, the healthcare sector’s need to process and store information produced from imaging, telemedicine, and electronic health records is an enormous challenge. So, too, is the need to provide low-carbon heat to buildings and hot water systems.    

For AI and Edge computing applications, the combined technology is a game-changing solution, with the capacity to cool in silence, the highest power GPUs, and extreme rack densities, in the smallest space possible, without the need for large and costly purpose-built buildings with cold and hot aisles.   

The Likido-Lenovo-Iceotope 360º approach to providing server cooling with high-grade heat recovery saves data centre operators on two of their most expensive operational costs: energy and water consumption.  

Data centre operators can also cut their energy costs by selling the excess heat to the local district’s heat network. Utilising excess heat, homes and offices in the immediate area can be provided with space heating and hot water from heat recycled from the data centre’s cooling utilities. Excess heat produces further cooling when no district heating system is available via Likido AD absorption chillers, improving PUE.

Likido-Lenovo-Iceotope systems are adaptable to existing Lenovo air-cooled servers by using the Iceotope Ku:l liquid-cooled system. Precision delivery of dielectric coolant maximises the cooling directly to the hotspots meaning no front-to-back air cooling, no bottom-to-top immersion constraints, and no physical space wasted.

The other significant advantage is each liquid-cooled chassis is 100% sealed to isolate and protect the IT from the surrounding atmosphere. The sealed chassis creates a controlled environment impervious to dust, gases, and humidity.   

Likido heat pumps use carbon dioxide as the refrigerant fluid, also in a closed system. The cooling for the server racks is via a secondary heat transfer fluid, usually water or glycol. Recovered heat from servers is transported directly into the heating system, usually by water.

The powerful combination of Iceotope and Likido means that data centres can be located anywhere – even in the harshest IT environments. Mining or offshore locations in dusty or desert environments often operate without considering ambient air temperatures or renewable energy sources such as solar PV.

The Global Data Centre Liquid Cooling Market was valued at $1982.62m in 2020 and is expected to reach $7629.99m by 2026, at a CAGR of 25.2% over the forecast period 2021- 2026, research reveals.

Fully encapsulated liquid-cooled server racks run in near silence and do not need water or large volumes of air passing over them, which in turn causes noise and environmental concerns. This reduces the capital cost of specialised data centre buildings and alleviates the need for hot and cold aisles in facilities. 

Brian Bonar, Chairman & CEO of Dalrada, states, “We are very excited to collaborate with leading companies like Lenovo and Iceotope. This partnership allows Dalrada to provide a liquid-cooled solution that combines the benefits of Likido ONE’s robust system cost-savings, increased performance, and output. A bonus is that the heat recovery and modular design is customisable, as a solution for a multitude of applications.”

The Likido-Lenovo-Iceotope 360º solution is an integrated, immersion-cooled microdata centre with clean energy-driven cooling and heat recycling for maximised clean-energy efficiencies.