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.

Other types of liquid cooling see server nodes sit fully immersed inside a liquid bath, typically a non-conductive dielectric fluid, which transfers heat away from the components.

The move comes as some in the industry predict that liquid cooling will soon become a necessary feature even for mainstream server systems. Next-generation CPUs from Intel and AMD will likely push the limits for fan-based systems to keep servers cool enough, according to Cisco, which outlined the problem to our sister site The Next Platform recently.

Inspur said it has developed a special liquid-cooled rack server, the ORS3000S, to meet demands from datacenter operators for higher cooling efficiency and lower energy consumption. Cold plate liquid-cooling technology in this system increases cooling efficiency by 50 percent, the company claims. The ORS3000S also makes use of a centralized power supply design with built-in redundancy that powers multiple nodes and is 10 percent more efficient than using separate supplies.

Meanwhile, the more general-purpose NF5280M6 server is compatible with both air-cooled and liquid-cooled technologies, but using cold plate liquid cooling reduces the system's power consumption used for cooling by 80 percent, said Inspur. It features connectors for a variety of mainstream devices, offering greater flexibility in decoupling from liquid-cooled racks.

China-based Inspur said it is working with industry partners to implement the best end-to-end cooling solutions for customers, covering the entire lifecycle from design and consultation to product customization, delivery, and deployment.

Inspur also claims to have built a large development and manufacturing facility in Asia for liquid-cooled datacenter infrastructure to drive adoption of the technology. The facility is said to have the capacity to deliver 100,000 servers annually, enabling mass delivery of liquid-cooled rack servers on a delivery cycle of 5-7 days.

Last month, Inspur beat HPE to the punch with the launch of an Arm-based mainstream server. The NF5280R6 is built around Ampere's Altra and Altra Max processors and is a dual-socket rack-mount system in a 2U enclosure. The company said that it had delivered an Arm-based server to meet anticipated customer demand for such systems. ®

China-based server maker Inspur has joined the Arm server ecosystem, unveiling a rackmount system using Arm-based chips.

It said it has achieved Arm SystemReady SR certification, a compliance scheme run by the chip designer and based on a set of hardware and firmware standards that are designed to give buyers confidence that operating systems and applications will work on Arm-based systems.

Inspur may not be a familiar name to many, but the company is a big supplier to the hyperscale and cloud companies, and was listed by IDC as the third largest server vendor in the world by market share as recently as last year.

Memory maker Micron has announced availability of DDR5 server DRAM components in preparation for server and workstation platforms from Intel and AMD that are due to support the faster memory standard.

Micron said its DDR5 server memory parts are now available through commercial and industrial channel partners in support of qualification for next-generation server and workstation systems based on Intel and AMD CPUs.

In other words, the memory chips are here, but the servers are not yet ready for them. Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processor family will support the new memory standard, but Intel has repeatedly delayed this platform and volume production is not expected until later this year. AMD's Genoa, the first of its fourth-gen of Epyc server chips, is also expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of this year with support for DDR5.

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.

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.

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.

The world's server market will grow in 2022 – but more slowly than in the past – and could dip further, according to analyst firm TrendForce.

Supply chain issues are, unsurprisingly, one reason for predicted modest growth. Shanghai's COVID lockdowns, for example, mean China's server makers have struggled to open, and get the parts they need.

The likes of Dell and HPE were hurt by those lockdowns, but TrendForce feels they'll recover.

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.

Opinion Broadcom has yet to close the deal on taking over VMware, but the industry is already awash with speculation and analysis as to how the event could impact the cloud giant's product availability and pricing.

If Broadcom's track record and stated strategy tell us anything, we could soon see VMware refocus its efforts on its top 600 customers and raise prices, and leave thousands more searching for an alternative.

The jury is still out as to whether Broadcom will repeat the past or take a different approach. But, when it comes to VMware's ESXi hypervisor, customer concern is valid. There aren't many vendor options that can take on VMware in this arena, Forrester analyst Naveen Chhabra, tells The Register.

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.

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