Spotlight on: data centre cooling with Panasonic’s Paul Aitchison
elementalONLINE editor Joe Dart interviews Paul Aitchison, Senior Manager CAC Planning & Technical for Panasonic Heating & Cooling Solutions Europe, about a new range of coolant distribution units for data centres from its Tecnair brand.
Q: Can you give us a short overview of Tecnair as a company?
A: Tecnair’s specialism is within IT cooling and close control applications. There is also some specialism within high level ventilation, such as hospital applications. For example, if you’ve got an operating room and you need to provide fresh air, you have to have a super high level of filtration.
Q: What can you tell us about Tecnair’s new coolant distribution units (CDUs)?
A: AI and data centre applications are becoming extremely prevalent. The chips are becoming much more powerful, and more power means more heat. The only way of realistically managing this is moving away from a purely air-based system to a liquid cooling solution.
We already have quite a good portfolio of air-based cooling technology, but obviously in order for us to work within the market as a whole, we need to have a complete solution package approach.
Q: How are the CDUs different from others on the market?
A: Panasonic is renowned for quality, so our design principle is built around that. So since our acquisition of Tecnair, we’ve been trying to work with them if we can view within the business and the future direction, hence with the CDU, this level of quality that is expected from Panasonic.
In addition, we need to look at the design of the system in such a way to make it as serviceable as possible. So if you were to look inside our unit, there are numerous parts within the system that do not require any specialist tools. In fact, several parts don’t even need tools to be able to service them.
Q: Why are you launching the CDUs now?
A: There is such a massive growth within the market and we want to continue to support the development of Technair as a business and as part of Panasonic. The market is moving that way, so if we do not have that as a capability, we are essentially trying to fight with one arm.
Q: Is liquid cooling likely to replace air cooling in data centres?
A: Even in a data centre which is using a liquid coolant, you cannot, unless you are using immersion cooling which is more tricky to implement. You need to have a certain level of air cooling to move the air across the servers. There are different technologies that are developing within this area, but you have to have air still.
Q: What sort of opportunities does Tecnair/Panasonic see in the data centre market at the moment?
A: Because of the huge growth in the market, there are so many opportunities at so many levels. Now, if you are looking at a complete newbuild data centre, you need to look at the design. There will be an approach looking at the design from the ground up, providing products as part of the solution. But there are still numerous data centres out there that gradually want to move to a liquid cooling approach. This is where you’re seeing a lot of implementation of more hybrid solutions.
Co-location data centres again is something that’s of interest because you may have different requirements from a particular rack where there is a high load in one and then maybe slightly lower in others. So there needs to be a level of flexibility.
