There are no commonly accepted best practices or standards to refer to when assessing the fire hazard that single-phase immersion fluids pose in a data center application and the appropriate measures against them.
This report discusses recent innovations in air cooling, such as advanced evaporative cooling methods, AI-driven facility management and cutting-edge server heat sinks.
Li-ion batteries have many benefits but may have been adopted without sufficient risk analysis. Following serious data center fires, operators should be aware of the risk of damage, potential regulations and the costs of safety mitigation.
Direct liquid cooling (DLC) remains a hot topic for most data center organizations, and results from the Uptime Institute 2024 Cooling Systems Survey reveal why.
Metered-by-outlet iPDUs present a relatively straightforward method of collecting server-level power consumption data. This information will be increasingly important to data center efficiency — making iPDUs a more popular choice.
Alongside continued developments in liquid cooling, there are reports of air-cooled data centers that achieve standout levels of efficiency. Uptime explores the factors that combine to enable exceptional efficiency in air cooling.
Hyperscalers use DC busbars in their racks. Proven at large scale, the technology saves energy and materials, but without a market for DC servers that meets the needs of smaller operators and enterprises, no one else will use it.
While the fire risk with lithium-ion batteries is widely understood, guidance on how best to mitigate it is still evolving. Controlling a Li-ion fire is difficult because of chemistry that creates the risk of thermal runaway.
It is becoming a near certainty that many facility operators will use direct liquid cooling within a few years. This raises a number of engineering questions, one of which is how to size coolant distribution units.
Underwater data centers promise to be both economical and sustainable. The prerequisite densification of infrastructure and unmanned operations may only suit specific workloads, but lessons learned under water may influence land facilities.
Adoption of direct liquid cooling (DLC) continues to grow slowly, according to recent Uptime research. However, more operators are considering it for future use due to mounting thermal management and sustainability challenges.
Results from the Uptime Institute Supply Chain Survey 2023 reveal that data center owners and operators are continuing to suffer supply chain delays, but these appear to be less frequent and severe than in 2022.
Electric grids face serious issues largely because of national efforts to reduce carbon emissions and boost electrification. Data center growth will add to these problems — but unreliable data could lead to poor decision-making.
Refrigeration’s history of progress is also a history of environmental concern. Whenever new refrigerants solve a problem, they create further crises down the line — and now history appears to be repeating itself.
Preliminary calculations by Uptime Intelligence suggest the initial impact of generative AI on global data center power use is low — but it will rise quickly as adoption increases. How far generative AI will go remains unclear.