Supercomputing & Data Centre Equipment Design
Warley Design Solutions has recently contributed to a number of ground-breaking developments in data centre equipment design technology.
The growth in virtualised “cloud computing” has driven the need for faster switching and throughput, placing higher demands on EMC containment, thermal management and I/O connector count. In this challenging industry products are often measured in terms of cost per port, and while performance is vital, unit cost is also critical if the product is to be commercially successful.
We could potentially be seeing the beginning of a return to the centralisation of many computing nodes into large monolithic units, with modern high capacity processors that are now pushing the boundaries of conventional thermal management techniques and from our own telecoms experience we know where the boundaries are when using industry standard Equipment Practice (EP) such as 19″ (IEC 60297). With forced-air cooling comes issues such as n+1 redundancy, fan fail scenarios & resulting flow reversal, issues of hot-swap and time dependencies, fan noise, filtration, increased dissipation due to fans alone, airflow management (hot / cold aisle containment) etc.
We played a central role in the development of an exciting technological breakthrough – a liquid cooling system for high-end computing hardware that features cooling by total immersion in a specially engineered dielectric fluid. The system provides ground-breaking advancements in cooling capacity whilst being completely silent running and offering massive reductions in energy consumption. Our blind-mate hot-swap module was entirely unprecedented, and redefined the technology limits for Plug-in Units (PIUs).