Rittal’s new Cooled-by-ZutaCore liquid cooling solution unveiled at OCP Summit
Members of the Rittal and ZutaCore teams recently took part in OCP’s Global Summit, held virtually May 12 - 15. Despite it not being a live gathering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of enthusiasm around the event, and plenty of great information being shared on a wide range of topics. Here’s a bit of background on OCP, a recap of what we learned at the event, and some exciting news we were able to share with attendees.
What is OCP?
The Open Compute Project, or OCP, is a 200-member global non-profit community of technology leaders working together to address the most pressing challenges facing data centers today: the exponential growth in data – and the associated issues around power consumption and cooling. The OCP was formed to help data centers reduce their operating costs, energy consumption, and environmental impact.
How will it do all that? By leveraging an open source hardware “ecosystem” to develop fully standardized IT architectures. In the minds of the OCP, proprietary infrastructures should be a thing of the past, and greater choice, customization and cost savings should be the hallmarks of the data center of the near future.
As a leading manufacturer of IT infrastructures, Rittal has been a proud member of the OCP community since 2012, and has been integral in the development of an OCP rack. We’ve already extended our portfolio to include a complete line of OCP standards-conforming products, and will continue to provide customized application-specific racks, plus accessories, a unique power supply unit, and an innovative new cooling system (more on that below).
What is Open Rack? What Are the Benefits?
The OCP’s Rack & Power Project group is an initiative within the overall community focused specifically on developing uniformity around rack and power designs (note that the term “rack” is interchangeable with “enclosure”). Some of the goals of this group are to:
- Provide a standard rack architecture that features a flexible frame and power infrastructure capable of supporting a wide range of solutions, and additional features such as physical security
- Enable new advanced cooling solutions, including direct chip, immersion, and door-based heat exchangers and interfaces between cooling and the data center infrastructure
- Identify power and battery backup solutions that scale across different enclosure power levels and allow for different power input types
In 2018, OCP announced the creation of the Advanced Cooling Solutions sub-project within the Rack & Power project. In doing so, the community hoped to identify a cooling solution that large-scale deployments could depend on for reliability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Liquid cooling checks all these boxes, but one roadblock to implementation has been that many data centers don’t have the infrastructure to provide water directly to racks. This is why Rittal’s unveiling of its new Cooled-by-ZutaCore waterless, two-phase liquid cooling solution at the OCP Summit was met with such enthusiasm.
Highlights of the OCP Summit
With its collaboration with ZutaCore, Rittal has expanded its wide range of solutions with innovative direct-to-chip (sometimes referred to as direct on chip) liquid cooling for high power densities and hotspot situations. These solutions give data centers highly efficient, scalable cooling that meet the demands of Edge, hyperscale, collocation and HPC. The Cooled-by-ZutaCore solution features direct-contact cooling that uses a non-conductive liquid and is available in two-phase direct-contact or single-phase on-demand options.
- The product line includes a rear-door-air (RDA) option – a unit that incorporates the cooling components directly into the rear door, saving space both within the rack and throughout the data center. This option can be quickly deployed into existing data centers without modifying existing infrastructures
- The other option is the In-Rack Edge solution, available in both air-cooled and water-cooled versions. The air-cooled option can be installed into any rack in almost any environment – wherever high-powered processing is needed. The water-cooled option offers energy-efficient cooling of up to 70 kW of processors in a single rack
In addition to the reveal of Rittal’s new Cooled-by-ZutaCore solution, here are some of the notable topics and sessions from the virtual summit:
- Closed Loop Cooling for High Performance Compute Systems presented by Hyve Solutions
- Data Centers Today, Trends, and Challenges presented by QCT
- Open from Cloud to Edge, Our Solutions for the Seamless Transition presented by Wiwynn
- Overview of Open Rack V3 Power System presented by Facebook and Microsoft
- Open Rack Frame presented by Facebook and Rittal
- Silver BusBar Plating Connection Reliability Testing presented by Rittal
“We’re thrilled to be part of OCP. The community is eagerly sharing valuable knowledge and lending insights that will be critical in developing smart, cost-effective solutions to address the challenges we’re facing today, and those on the horizon.” - Resul Altinkilic
