Vertiv discussed data center challenges and end-to-end sustainability with industry experts and academics at the 7 x 24 Exchange Fall Conference 2023, held at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, TX, from October 8 to 11, 2023.
Vertiv's Chief Innovation Officer, Gregory Ratcliff, spearheaded the panel discussion, titled "The Elephant in the Room: An Industry/University Perspective on the Current and Future Challenges in Data Center and Sustainability", on October 10, 2023. It featured the experts and academics in the data center industry as panelists: Arad Azizi, Senior Advanced R&D Engineer/Scientist at Honeywell; Bahgat Sammakia, Vice President for Research and ES2 Center Director at Binghamton University, State University of New York; Alfonso Ortega, James R. Birle Professor of Engineering Technology and ES2 Site Director at Villanova University; and Mark Seymour, a distinguished engineer at Cadence Design Systems.
The presentation explored the insights of academics and industry members on the end-to-end sustainability of data centers, the progress of the Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2) in maximizing energy efficiency, and existing and future challenges amid the increasing number and size of data centers.
Accelerating Technology Transfer Through Industry-Academia Collaboration
During Ratcliff's presentation, key stakeholders echoed the importance of the Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2), an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), for rapid technological transfer.
These centers serve as the breeding ground for significant technological advancements for energy efficiency in data centers by fostering a collaborative environment between industry and academia. The program ensures that research is relevant and translates into products and practical solutions.
Many potential technological advancements from basic research fail to seamlessly reach the data center industry. This is crucial for promoting end-to-end sustainability amid rising demands and increasing numbers and sizes of data centers. The IUCRC program ensures that innovations explored in the university setting will enter the industry to examine their impact rapidly.
From an industry perspective, these centers provide a platform to address the industry's challenges, such as setting long-term goals or lowering TRLs (Technology Readiness Level). Often, commercial entities need more resources to carry out preliminary research, making academia an ideal partner. This partnership has been particularly fruitful in immersion cooling technology, where research is primarily conducted in academic institutions.
Mentoring is a crucial aspect of industry-academia collaboration. Mark Seymour, one of the premier industry mentors, highlighted the role of mentors in maintaining continuity in projects despite the constant change of researchers. "The researchers are constantly changing the program, yet the research [must] continue. So, the industry is helping create that continuity by guiding the next people to take over to make sure that research does play," Seymour conveyed, pointing out the satisfaction from helping shape the industry's future leaders.
The panel expressed the importance of industrial engagement in research centers, where setting targets, attending meetings, and mentoring students are crucial for the success of the IUCRC. This ensures that research is on point and translates into products and practical solutions, thus contributing to the industry's momentum.
Ratcliff agreed on the importance of mentoring in promoting rapid technological transfer and improvement in data centers. He mentioned that Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, has invested in the workforce development and training of the next generation of data center engineers. They have been committed to collaborating closely with universities and mentoring ES2 researchers consistently.
Putting Sustainability at the Heart of Technological Innovations
Sustainability has been mentioned as the heart of promising ES2 projects, partnering with industries to better understand the bottlenecks in their processes. The panel has said integrating cooling technologies with intelligent control of IT load at the data center level is one of the innovations explored in universities. It's developed by interdisciplinary teams with the aim of predicting the workload of data centers for a specific period.
They also stressed the importance of integrating the findings of ES2 research into a strategy to support sustainability. "We shouldn't be trying to think of things in isolation. When we develop certain things, we will look at them in quite a lot of detail in isolation. But you need a program like ES2 to look at things more holistically," stressed Bahgat Sammakia.
Sammakia also underscored the importance of bringing all different technologies together to understand the behavior of various components to determine every innovation's impact on data centers.
When asked what sustainability means, Dr. Ortega emphasized its broad scope and the need to consider the "overall holistic end-to-end impact" of technology, from design and production to decommissioning and disposal of material products. He urges industry experts and the academia to look at data center innovations from a broader scope: "We need to move outside of our comfort zone, what we believe we're expert in, and also try to understand kind of a broader picture of technology and its impact."
Panelists have noted the growing energy consumption of data centers due to increased demand for artificial intelligence. This development also heightens the industry's social responsibility to choose sustainable solutions. "Perhaps the most sustainable data center is the one we never have to build," one of the panelists mentioned.
Understanding the behavior of data center systems allows industry experts and academia to maximize data center capacity and design devices most efficiently, championing sustainability. A speaker noted in the presentation: "How many data centers are never utilized at their full capacity? If we can understand and manage that behavior, we can ensure that we don't have to build so many data centers, which is the biggest deal, saving."
The speakers have also mentioned that having optimal computational performance while controlling the total cost of ownership goes together with sustainability. Sustainable solutions help data centers gain better numbers in their OpEx and even CapEx.
Dr. Sammakia noted that data centers don't always need to introduce new technology if the solutions work efficiently and meet requirements. He mentioned that "material change takes time." ES2 projects must also be data and experiment-driven, significantly as the world rapidly changes.
In Conclusion
Collaboration between academia and industry, focusing on sustainability, is crucial for the future of data centers. Innovations like liquid cooling and intelligent IT load control can transform the industry while optimizing performance and controlling costs. It's essential to understand technology's broader impact and strive for a sustainable future.
