Guest Bio
Michael Strouboulis is the Director of Business Development for Digital Infrastructure at Danfoss.
Episode Summary
Michael Strouboulis, director of business development for digital infrastructure at Danfoss, joins John Sheff, Danfoss director of public and industry affairs, to discuss the latest trends in data centers and data center cooling.
Main Points
- Data center operation is critical; effective cooling is needed to keep data centers running smoothly
- Data centers generate a lot of heat due to the physical materials that electronics and electrical equipment inside a data center are made of and this heat needs to be removed in order to keep the systems running and preventing downtime.
- The pressure is on engineers to come up with better ways of cooling and they not only have to design for increased operational efficiency and reduced power consumption, but they also have to design for decreased carbon emissions inside the data center and the data halls.
- Cooling systems have to function at low and high IT loads as well as all the different ambient conditions, which vary based on geographic location.
- Trends currently top of mind for data centers: the green transition and push for sustainability; changes in cooling techniques, including the adoption of low-GWP refrigerants; and increasing power density.
- Power usage, water usage and carbon usage all play into sustainability.
- Free cooling is a new technique that uses available liquid in the area (from a lake, river, etc.) to provide cooling through gasketed plate heat exchanges and other arrangements.
- There are also evaporate and adiabatic cooling techniques, in conjunction with Danfoss’ high-pressure pumps, misting nodules and variable-speed drives and fans.
- Data centers also provide an opportunity to recover and reuse the heat they generate to heat other buildings as part of a district energy system. Danfoss has Energy Transfer Stations for heat reuse.
- Growth is forecast for data centers of all sizes. The expansion of 5G networks will push for processor to handle data from connected devices at the edge and increase growth of edge computing.
- Needs change over time so all of these cooling technologies will need specifications to be rewritten in greater detail by data center operators and consulting engineers in order to meet cybersecurity guidelines, uptime, and decarbonization levels that customers have come to expect.
Links
Learn how the Federal Energy Management Program is helping agencies improve energy efficiency in data centers: https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/energy-efficiency-data-centers
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For more information and additional episodes of the EnVisioneering Exchange podcast, visit https://www.danfoss.com/en-us/about-danfoss/insights-for-tomorrow/envisioneering-exchange/