| |JANUARY 20258NEXT-GENERATION TECH INNOVATION ENABLED BY LIQUID COOLINGBy Phil Read, Senior Director, Colocation Product Management, Equinixhere's no doubt that AI is changing the face of the digital economy and business leaders are thinking about how to find the right IT infrastructure to support their company's AI goals. At the same time, data center providers are keeping pace through innovation, achieving higher levels of performance, efficiency, and sustainability, to adapt to changing demands and challenges. Liquid cooling is one such innovation.According to Gartner, Liquid cooling uses a liquid, such as water, or a refrigerant, rather than air, to cool the data center. This allows the cooling solution to be brought closer to the heat source, thus requiring less, if any, fan power. Liquid cooling can solve the high-density, server-cooling problem, because liquid (conductive cooling) conducts more than 3,000 times as much heat as air and requires less energy to do so, allowing increased data center densities. Newer piping technology means the probability of leaks is extremely low.But liquid cooling is more than just a method for cooling power-intensive servers. It's one part of a holistic strategy that IT teams must have to navigate a new and dynamic array of market pressures. Liquid cooling won't solve all these problems on its own; rather, it is an essential element of a high-performance data center. As AI continues to build momentum, data centers designed around efficiency and sustainability have a fundamental advantage.A Wave of Change for the Data Center IndustryThe data center industry has seen sweeping changes in recent years. Several trends have put growing pressure on the industry, including:· The explosive growth of data, which has become a critical resource gives enterprises a competitive advantage· A resulting surge in compute-intensive workloads from AI, high-performance computing (HPC), etc., that require more processing power· The need to increase data center densities while balancing space constraints· Concerns about utility power supply and cost· New sustainability imperatives and the shift to satisfy power demand with renewable energy· Edge computing, which requires more processing power distributed to more places· Increasing regulation of the data center environment, including around data center efficienciesRegulations and voluntary standards like Singapore's (SS) the German Energy Efficiency Bill and the Netherlands Energy Saving Obligation address things like data center operating temperatures and emissions reduction for data centers. These are just a few examples of new efficiency and sustainability requirements--and there are more on the horizon.TPhil Read, Senior Director, Colocation Product Management, Equinix is a proven Commercial and business development leader with nearly 20 years of experience building scalable high-performing teams that deliver and support advanced network infrastructure solutions.CXO SPEAKS
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