Born in 1999, it is 20 years ago when OVHCloud revolutionized traditional data centers. A place where hot and cold corridors alternate, the result of thousands of servers and machines working in unison that give off heat and need to be cooled with large air conditioning machines. Yes, the data center is the least sustainable element of the ICT world despite the great strides that have been made in reducing energy costs and incorporating sustainable sources.
Enter the data center OVHCloud, as Byte TI has done in the one that the French firm has in Roubaix, is to do it in another dimension. The creator of the firm, Octave Klaba, was clear from the beginning: transforming data centers involved designing a technology that would significantly reduce the main expense of any data center: energy consumption derived from cooling.
Water in the data center
The solution was found in the water. If it was possible to channel it towards the machines themselves, expensive air conditioning machines could be dispensed with. The negative aspect is that it could not go to the market to feed on servers that would allow it to serve its clients, so OVHCloud would have to manufacture them itself.
The French multinational has been developing since its inception a liquid cooling system that dissipates the heat emitted by the servers. For this, it has developed its own system of copper pipes that reach the central core of the server and that provide it with a continuous current of water and that mitigate the heat of the CPU and GPU. The incoming water is responsible for cooling while once it comes into contact with the chips it leaves, hot, outside the data center, where it is finally dissipated through optimized dry coolers. With this, OVHCloud takes advantage of the lower thermal resistance of water than that of air cooling, and there is no need to use any type of cooling method.
The importance of the OVHcloud factory
The OVHCloud system would be meaningless without factories that produce its innovative servers. In the case of the Roubaix data center, it is located a few kilometers away, and a human team together with various automated parts work synchronously to produce around 100 servers per day. The automated part is in charge of manufacturing the gear on which the plates, transistors, chips, wiring and, of course, the water circulation system will be placed. All this is done almost by hand, with about sixty people working on this work. For now, although OVHCloud has thought about automating this process as well, they have seen that it is more expensive and that there are also tasks such as laying the wiring correctly, which a robot is incapable of performing. So today, the monotonous task cannot be replaced by a machine “and it would not do it with as much quality as a human does.”
Contrary to what happens in most data centers, OVHcloud does not have to resort to air conditioning to cool the machines: water is in charge of doing it
The multinational therefore has total control over each of the machines. Despite the fact that this methodology might seem to increase costs, the truth is that it entails a series of advantages in terms of innovation, competitiveness and resistance.
Thanks to this model, not only are cooling energy costs reduced, but the circular economy is favored: 100% of the servers are disassembled after use, providing, through exhaustive tests, components for reuse, which contributes to extend the overall life cycle of hardware. With this, the company guarantees that its servers will work for at least five years. OVHcloud also applies its circular approach to data centers, renovating existing buildings rather than building new ones.
Obviously, water is a limited resource and although the water used by the French multinational to cool its data centers flows through a closed circuit, it cannot prevent part of it from evaporating. His new lines of research work to ensure that this evaporation does not occur. Some H2O losses that it already reduced significantly when it opted to incorporate copper into its water circuits. The mechanism means that water cooling is three times cheaper and more efficient than traditional air cooling.
The innovative initiative has grown over time. Since 2003, the year in which it was first implemented, OVHcloud now has 34 data centers around the world. That’s more than 450,000 water-cooled servers.
