TECHNOLOGY

JOE CAPES CEO , LIQUIDSTACK

Capes explains that , thanks to the sheer rack density that LiquidStack ’ s solutions can be used to achieve , the company ’ s DataTanks are also finding homes far away from the hyperscalers and public cloud providers , all the way at the network ’ s edge .

“ The key with two-phase immersion is that you can very densely pack in the boards . In the data centres that we built with Bitfury , the boards are placed within just 2.5mm of one another ,” he enthuses .

For edge data centres - which are being deployed just about everywhere , from mountaintops in Tibet to the Sagrada Familia in the heart of Barcelona - density is just part of the puzzle that LiquidStack ’ s solutions can solve . “ Modern IT gear actually has a pretty wide tolerance for temperature and humidity variation . What servers don ' t like is a rapid swing in humidity or temperature ,” says Capes . “ The fact that our systems are hermetically sealed also gets us really excited about edge computing , particularly as we start to see more and more computing happening at the edge . Data centres now are being put in places where you don ' t usually expect to see them , like urban centres or regional locations .”

LiquidStack has been conducting a number of trials in Asia with Japanese automaker Toyota , which is exploring the potential of micro-scale edge data centres to support the development of autonomous vehicles . “ They ' re looking at autonomous vehicles where you have very dense compute applications onboard the vehicle itself , but the need for those vehicles to communicate with data centres or even other vehicles in their immediate vicinity is such that the communication needs to happen with very low latency ,” Capes explains . “ If you ' re in the countryside in an autonomous vehicle in a city several hundred miles away to tell your car what to do , that ' s not very practical .”

Hermetically sealed , hyper-dense ( a 500 kilowatt micro data centre can achieve densities of about 10 kilowatts per rack ; LiquidStack ’ s DataTanks have achieved densities of more than 250 kilowatts per tank ) edge data centres have tremendous potential to support the development of the edge computing infrastructure needed to support real development of IoT , 5G and autonomous vehicle applications .

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