Guest Bio
Michael Strouboulis is the Danfoss director of business development for data centers.
Episode Summary
Host Vic Marinich, global marketing director for air conditioning at Danfoss, is joined by Michael Strouboulis, Danfoss’ director of business development for data centers, to discuss the latest data center cooling technologies.
Main Points
- Cooling is essential for data centers. Uptime is critical for business and there cannot be a disruption. Because these data centers are running all the time, they need to find efficient and effective solutions to run their operations. (1:25)
- The data center industry has done a phenomenal job in designing very efficient information technology equipment and has reduced the energy used for the servers, storage and networking. It has also done a great job in reducing the energy used for cooling with the use of Smart Controls Algorithms Data Science artificial intelligence. (2:35)
- Data centers are also looking to reduce their carbon emissions. All of the major data center operators have published their net zero or carbon negative target dates. There is an opportunity to significantly accelerate this with heat recovery and reuse, which takes heat generated by data centers and sends it to a district energy loop. This is quite common in Northern and Eastern Europe. (4:50)
- We don’t need to limit ourselves to district energy loops. We can reuse the heat by employing a heat station and recover the heat and either use it as is or boost it to any temperature required. The waste heat from a data center has to be reduced or eliminated if the data center operators are committed to meeting their decarbonization targets. (6:12)
- We are seeing more cooling solutions using closed loop water cooling, also called waterless cooling. We are also seeing chillers with supplemental free cooling using heat exchangers that are used to reject the heat to the atmosphere without using any vapor compression. (8:36)
- Chips are getting smaller and more powerful. The heat density of the chips is rising and air cannot remove the heat from these chips, so there is a shift to liquid cooling of the chips, servers and racks. (12:40)
- Data centers are working very closely with utilities to secure their power needs. Many data center operators have been sourcing most or all of their power from renewable sources. (16:55)
- Some reasons for not deploying the latest and most energy efficient technologies available for data centers: financial, physical and uptime constraints. But prices for cooling technologies are very stable and predictable. Cooling equipment is getting smaller and more efficient so it doesn’t require the same square footage or volume of space. (20:53)
- Older data centers have the opportunity to upgrade to newer equipment that is more robust and resilient. (22:20)
Links
Learn more about data center heat recovery: https://www.danfoss.com/en-us/markets/buildings-commercial/shared/data-centers/heat-reuse/
Learn more about liquid cooling: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/an-introduction-to-liquid-cooling-in-the-data-center/
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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/