New extremes in edge computing: Iceotope’s Precision Liquid-Cooled servers

[MattQuirk]

For decades, giant data centers housing thousands of servers have been the backbone of our digital economy.

But we’ve now entered a new era—one in which the data center is, paradoxically, no longer necessarily the center of our data.

Instead, the hardware and infrastructure of the data center are now being brought to the data source itself—the end users, otherwise known as the edge. As a result, real-time value can be captured and delivered much faster and more efficiently.

But this breakthrough comes with its own challenges. Edge locations could be anywhere: factory floors, hospitals, offices, or in harsher climates, like a research station in the Antarctic. Such precarious environments expose the delicate electronics (not to mention data) inside each server to airborne contaminants and extreme temperatures.

To combat these risks, Iceotope has created innovative cooling systems that are fully sealed, ultra-efficient, and impervious to the elements, making high-performance edge computing possible virtually anywhere.

Taking edge computing to new extremes

Iceotope’s KUL EXTREME, developed in partnership with HPE OEM Solutions, is an answer to the increasing demand for reliable, high-performance computing at the edge.

With precision cooling power that reduces energy usage by up to 90%, the KUL EXTREME raises the bar for cost efficiency. At the same time, it has a lower environmental impact compared to traditional data centers, which are responsible for 1% of annual energy-related greenhouse gas emissions according to the International Energy Agency.

One hundred percent sealed at the chassis level, the KUL EXTREME also completely isolates and protects critical IT from airborne contaminants and humidity, no matter how extreme the environment.

Take a desert, for example. Scorching during the day, freezing at night, but nothing Iceotope’s Precision Liquid-Cooled servers can’t withstand. Or, at the almost opposite extreme, take an offshore oil rig. Rather than mining data from a faraway mainland server, it can now be collected and computed directly on the rig and regardless of the weather conditions. This means that drill rig techs can receive information about their oil mining operations in milliseconds.

Iceotope’s low-cost, ultra-efficient micro data centers make such edge computing possible. And with no need for server fans and air-cooling infrastructure, these systems can operate in near silence, slipping into noise-sensitive environments like hospitals and offices almost unnoticed.

HPE OEM partnership delivers value at the source

The KUL EXTREME project called for a partner that could supply a high-performance server as well as the technical expertise to make the innovative cooling system perform as designed.

The HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 server was the ideal solution for the project, and the accompanying technical expertise of HPE OEM Solutions sealed the deal.

To build the KUL EXTREME solution, Iceotope integrated HPE ProLiant servers into a fully sealed chassis equipped with its Precision Liquid Cooling capabilities. Meanwhile, HPE OEM Solutions developed custom BIOS software that enables the re-engineered servers to boot up correctly. The result is a high-performance micro data center that can thrive just about anywhere.

This partnership has broken down longstanding barriers for enterprise compute at the edge, however hostile the location or temperature. Iceotope is helping change the way the world computes, and I couldn’t be happier that they’re collaborating with HPE to do so.