Aquila unveils water cooled micro data centre
Fri 18 Nov 2016
Aquila, creator of the Aquarius line of water-cooled computing solutions, has unveiled a new water-cooled micro data center built around Aquarius.
With the growth in the Internet of Things, and concurrent need for data management services located outside of traditional data centers, there is a growing market for edge data center solutions that can be managed remotely. The Herma micro data center is appropriate for remote edge data centers and can be placed in a container or warehouse space.
The Herma was developed by Aquila and partner TAS Energy, a developer of green, modular storage solutions. At only 8’ x 8’, it features highly efficient storage and bandwidth capacity, cooled by the Aquarius fixed cold plate warm water cooling system.
In-rack water cooling eliminates the need for forced-air cooling of the data center, which means that the heat can be regulated and system protected without the need for expensive integral HVAC solutions.
In a press release announcing the Herma unit, Jack Kolar, VP of TAS Energy, said, “The marked needs flexible configurations tuned to edge applications. We feel Aquila’s experience in HPC systems is key to attacking the edge data center problem.”
Herma is the first in a series of micro modular data centers, which can be scaled down for small businesses and scaled up as companies grow. All units in the series are planned to be ruggedized and durable, appropriate for remote deployment as required.
Head of business development for data centers at Aquila, Bob Bolz, said that the Aquarius cooling system can reduce heat output by up to 30%, saving up to 250,000 kWh per year.
“The Herma is a small, 8’x8′ data center that packs an incredible amount of liquid cooled computing and features state-of-the-art storage and network bandwidth based on highly reliable and well-understood HPC computer, storage, and network architecture,” said Bolz.
The Herma unit is built on Unison technology, and each can contain up to 6.4PB of storage, scalable to the needs of the customer. It has the capability to deliver 200GB/s bandwidth and can be configured to HDD, SSD or hybrid storage solutions.
Herma micro data centers will be manufactured and ready for delivery early next year. The Aquarius system and Herma designs were presented to the public at the SC16 supercomputer conference in Salt Lake City.
