Microsoft’s new data center designs include a cooling system that it claims will consume zero water while at the same time offering liquid cooling of the hardware.
The designs leverage a chip-level liquid cooling solution that can provide precise temperature control without water evaporation. The closed-loop system continuously circulates water between servers and chillers like traditional water-cooling systems, but thanks to the temperature controls, it doesn’t require a fresh water supply due to loss from evaporation.
Steve Solomon, vice president of data center infrastructure engineering at Microsoft, said in a blog post last month that the designs will spare more than 125 million liters (33 million gallons) of water per year per data center.
Microsoft has gotten quite open about sharing its knowledge in recent years, but these designs are for its own use. “Though zero water chillers are already being used throughout all industries, our next generation data center designs are for our Microsoft data centers,” said a Microsoft spokesperson.
Still, they serve as an inspiration for other data center designers, notes Alan Howard, senior analyst for data center infrastructure at research firm Omdia.
Doing things that benefit communities is important for hyperscalers and other large data center operators, Howard said. Lately there’s “more community pushback on data center projects, so anything they can do to lessen getting pushback on their data center projects and also not running into these challenges on water consumption is a good thing,” he said.
And even without the fine details, Microsoft is providing a pretty good picture of what it’s doing. None of the equipment is a secret, just the configuration. And that alone serves as a good example for others.
“It’s a good sustainability story,” Howard said. The hyperscalers have impressive sustainability initiatives, and “if the leaders are going in a certain direction – which is all about being good community stewards and good stewards of natural resources – these are the things that kind of turn into trends.”
Microsoft’s community pledge
The most economical way to cool a facility is through evaporative cooling. It’s also the highest consumption method, which is how Microsoft found itself consuming hundreds of millions of liters of water to cool its data centers.
Microsoft measures water efficiency through the metric called water usage effectiveness (WUE), which divides total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption for IT equipment.
In its last fiscal year, Microsoft data centers operated with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh, a 39% improvement compared to 2021, when it reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh.
There is a slight trade-off, however. Traditionally, water is evaporated to reduce the power demand for cooling water. Microsoft is replacing evaporative systems with mechanical cooling, which has a slight increase in power draw and thus would increase Microsoft’s power usage effectiveness (PUE), the metric used to measure the energy efficiency of data centers.
The new data center design is part of a larger effort – Microsoft’s Datacenter Community pledge – announced in June 2024. The company made a commitment to build and operate digital infrastructure that addresses societal challenges, including climate change, and benefits the local community. Under the plans, Microsoft said its global operations would eventually run on 100% renewable energy.
Source:: Network World