Every day, companies are bringing new AI solutions to market. Finding innovative ways to integrate AI into business operations is of paramount importance to management across industries. From supply chain management to research and analytics to product marketing, AI is growing exponentially as the technology improves and key stakeholders become more comfortable using it.
As data center managers know, extreme data processing is required to deliver the results users expect from AI and ML applications. The deployment of powerful AI chips has pushed the industry toward liquid cooling—a necessity for the successful implementation of AI—and hyperscale data centers are preparing to adopt liquid cooling at scale.
As hyperscale data centers rapidly move to liquid cooling, the industry must adapt to support these key customers in their large-scale projects. Part of that adaptation must be the development of standard cooling solutions that are compatible with a wide range of liquid-cooled racks. This work will help meet growing demand by easing supply chain constraints and improving the reliability of the technology worldwide. Although many companies have developed proprietary solutions and will continue to do so, there are also many benefits to greater standardization.
Improving standardization with the Open Compute Project
The OCP develops open source design concepts to which all manufacturers and end users can contribute, and drives innovation focused on ready-to-use and easy-to-procure solutions across the data center space. All OCP solutions are compatible within the OCP universe, meaning they can be deployed quickly and sustainably at scale.
Because OCP designs are open source, any manufacturer can build the products. The competitive advantage for manufacturers is that they use the reference designs to create designs that can be manufactured quickly and at scale. OCP’s approach represents a new way of looking at the entire IT ecosystem, from how devices are deployed to how they are powered and cooled.
Earlier this summer, the Open Compute Project (OCP) announced a new initiative to create an Advanced Liquid Cooling Solutions Project to drive industry-wide collaboration on these important topics and address the need for liquid cooling.
In an article by Data Center Frontier, Bill Carter, chief technology officer of the Open Compute Foundation, was quoted as saying, “OCP envisions a supply chain that offers a variety of IT equipment (servers, storage, networking, etc.) that works with a variety of liquid-cooled racks from many solution providers. … Direct contact, immersion, and other advanced cooling options are within the scope of this project.”
This OCP initiative is an important project as it supports the growth of liquid cooling, which benefits data centers, equipment manufacturers, and improves sustainability in the industry. However, manufacturers developing OCP solutions and the hyperscale data center projects that use them need to keep a few key points in mind:
Looking for complete solutions
Many manufacturers may offer OCP components, but to fully leverage the supply and manufacturing advantages of OCP systems, hyperscale and high-performance computing data center managers should partner with vendors that offer a complete solution package. This includes racks, busbars, CDUs, distribution boards, and more. Purchasing multiple solutions from the same vendor improves the potential supply chain and cost efficiencies enabled by OCP components, as well as the pre-shipment integration that a single vendor solution can provide.
Local manufacturing
Data center managers know how difficult it is to not get the solutions they need when they need them. OCP solutions can be manufactured worldwide and meet the same standards. This gives equipment manufacturers more options to produce solutions in the areas where they will ultimately be used. It is important to find partners who can offer local manufacturing.
Interoperability
OCP components offer the benefit of interoperability. Components that conform to reference design specifications mean that components are interoperable across manufacturers. This further increases the value of the OCP ecosystem and can minimize supply chain strain as OCP components can be sourced from a wider variety of suppliers.
Diploma
OCP has the potential to reduce supply chain constraints by providing standardization in the design of racks, equipment and rack manifolds, connectors, tubing, and more. This also has the potential to reduce pressure on companies outside of North America that ship to the U.S., thereby reducing carbon emissions from shipping and lowering costs for end users. The efficiency gains will also help manufacturers reduce enclosure costs, which in turn can reduce costs for data center managers and planners.
In the data center industry, it is often said that if something is two years old, it is obsolete. This makes the work of OCP all the more important. One company cannot become the sole manufacturer of data center infrastructure without creating a monopoly. However, if we as an industry can agree on certain rules and standards that govern the specifications of the equipment, this will contribute to the success of the entire industry.
