UK-based liquid cooling company Iceotope has scored £30 million (c $35.7 million) in a funding round led by Singapore's ABC Impact private equity provider, which sees a growing market for the technology in Asia.

The investment syndicate providing the funding comprises Northern Gritstone, British Patient Capital, Pavilion Capital, and an existing investor, Edinv. Also included is SDCL Energy Efficiency Income Trust, an investment company dedicated to energy-efficiency projects.

According to Iceotope, the investment syndicate also includes nVent, a specialist in heat-management systems and enclosures. In addition to investing, nVent has formed a trading agreement with Iceotope on modular integrated solutions for datacenters, edge facilities, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

The announcement comes a week after Iceotope showcased its latest Ku:l Data Center chassis-level cooling technology, developed with Intel and HPE. This allows customers to convert existing air-cooled servers to use liquid cooling with just a few minor modifications.

According to Iceotope, use of liquid cooling is long established in HPC applications, while air cooling has been the preferred approach in traditional enterprise, cloud, and colocation datacenters. This situation is now changing as the power consumption of IT infrastructure continues to rise, and it expects the global datacenter liquid cooling market to be worth $6.4 billion by 2027.

"Given the global importance of the datacenter sector, which can only increase as edge facilities proliferate, we look forward to accelerating our global deployment plan with the help of our new and existing investment partners," Iceotope CEO David Craig said in a statement.

ABC Impact Chief Investment Officer Tan Shao Ming said that climate and water solutions form a key investment theme for the company, given that a large share of data growth in the coming years is expected to come from Asia.

"We see vast potential to deploy this technology in Asia, especially regions with tropical climates, and we look forward to working with Iceotope to scale its positive impact," he said.

Iceotope claims that its chassis-level Precision Immersion cooling offers a reduction in water usage of up to 96 percent, reduction in power consumption of up to 40 percent, and up to 40 percent lower CO2 emissions per kW of IT equipment. ®

Analysis Jim Chanos, the infamous short-seller who predicted Enron's downfall, has said he plans to short datacenter real-estate investment trusts (REIT).

"This is our big short right now," Chanos told the Financial Times. "The story is that, although the cloud is growing, the cloud is their enemy, not their business. Value is accrued to the cloud companies, not the bricks-and-mortar legacy datacenters."

However, Chanos's premise that these datacenter REITs are overvalued and at risk of being eaten alive by their biggest customers appears to overlook several important factors. For one, we're coming out of a pandemic-fueled supply chain crisis in which customers were willing to pay just about anything to get the gear they needed, even if it meant waiting six months to a year to get it.

Microsoft is to deploy its "grid-interactive UPS technology" at the company's datacenter in Dublin, Ireland, later this year to demonstrate how such technology may be used to help decarbonize power grids.

The Redmond software giant disclosed last month how it and power management specialist Eaton were jointly working on technology that would allow the energy storage systems used for backup power in datacenters to also help smooth out any variability in the power grid due to the unpredictability of renewable energy sources.

Now Microsoft is moving to implement this, saying that its datacenter in Dublin will be a part of the solution to this problem later this year.

The datacenter is dead – at least according to FedEx, which announced plans to close its server farms and transition completely to the cloud, where it hopes to save an estimated $400 million annually.

At FedEx's investor relations day held last week, CIO Rob Carter said FedEx had long been a leader in technology, claiming the company was first to introduce tracking, handheld computers and automated package sorting. The next big movement in tech, Carter went on to say, is migrating all of its systems to the cloud.

"We've been working across this decade to simplify and streamline our technology and systems to create value all along the way by improving productivity, security and reliability," Carter said on the call.

Power and thermal management equipment essential to building datacenters is in short supply, with delays of months on shipments – a situation that's likely to persist well into 2023, Dell'Oro Group reports.

The analyst firm's latest datacenter physical infrastructure report – which tracks an array of basic but essential components such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), thermal management systems, IT racks, and power distribution units – found that manufacturers' shipments accounted for just one to two percent of datacenter physical infrastructure revenue growth during the first quarter.

"Unit shipments, for the most part, were flat to low single-digit growth," Dell'Oro analyst Lucas Beran told The Register.

Many security breaches involve leaks, but not perhaps in the same way as one revealed by noted security consultant Andrew Tierney, who managed to gain unauthorized access to a datacenter via what he delightfully terms the "piss corridor."

Tierney, who works as a consultant for security services outfit Pen Test Partners, revealed in a Twitter thread how one of his more memorable exploits involved demonstrating that it was possible to gain physical access to the supposedly secure area of a datacenter via its toilets.

Posting a diagram to illustrate, Tierney showed that the unnamed facility had a separate bathroom area for the general office space and the secure area where the IT infrastructure is housed. However, the two toilet facilities were adjoined, and Tierney realized there was actually a shared access space for servicing the toilets that ran behind both sets of cubicles, which he christened the "piss corridor."

Datacenter operator Switch Inc is being sued by investors over claims that it did not disclose key financial details when pursuing an $11 billion deal with DigitalBridge Group and IFM Investors that will see the company taken into private ownership if it goes ahead.

Two separate cases have been filed this week by shareholders Marc Waterman and Denise Redfield in the Federal Court in New York. The filings contain very similar claims that a proxy statement filed by Switch with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in regard to the proposed deal omitted material information regarding Switch's financial projections.

Both Redfield and Waterman have asked the Federal Court to put the deal on hold, or to undo it in the event that Switch manages in the meantime to close the transaction, and to order Switch to issue a new proxy statement that sets out all the relevant material information.

Liquid cooling specialist Iceotope claims its latest system allows customers to easily convert existing air-cooled servers to use its liquid cooling with just a few minor modifications.

Iceotope’s Ku:l Data Center chassis-level cooling technology has been developed in partnership with Intel and HPE, the company said, when it debuted the tech this week at HPE’s Discover 2022 conference in Las Vegas. The companies claim it delivers energy savings and a boost in performance.

According to Iceotope, the sealed liquid-cooled chassis enclosure used with Ku:l Data Center allows users to convert off-the-shelf air-cooled servers to liquid-cooled systems with a few small modifications, such as removing the fans.

Comment Liquid and immersion cooling have undergone something of a renaissance in the datacenter in recent years as components have grown ever hotter.

This trend has only accelerated over the past few months as we’ve seen a fervor of innovation and development around everything from liquid-cooled servers and components for vendors that believe the only way to cool these systems long term is to drench them in a vat of refrigerants.

Liquid and immersion cooling are by no means new technologies. They’ve had a storied history in the high-performance computing space, in systems like HPE’s Apollo, Cray, and Lenovo’s Neptune to name just a handful.

Comment Last month we shared four VMware ESXi alternatives for enterprises hedging their bets over Broadcom's impending takeover of the virtualization giant.

You can find those suggestions and all your comments right here.

But for small to midsized businesses looking for an escape from VMware's stranglehold on virtualization, you may find your next hypervisor is of the free and open source (FOSS) variety. Lord knows you gave us enough recommendations.

Server maker Inspur is going all-in on liquid cooling, making cold plate cooling technology available across its portfolio and working with third parties to assemble full-lifecycle solutions.

Inspur, which is a big supplier to cloud providers, said the move is another step towards becoming carbon neutral. It will offer cold plate liquid-cooling tech for all of its products, including general-purpose servers, high-density servers, rack servers, and the systems it labels as AI servers.

Cold plate cooling technology sees a liquid coolant circulated through heatsinks attached to components such as the CPU that generate a lot of heat. The heat is typically transferred by the coolant to a heat exchanger from where it can be dissipated, or is transferred to an external coolant circuit.

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022