Schneider Electric has launched an in-row cooling unit designed to place 30kW of heat removal in racks with high density computing.

The 30kW InRow cooling product can be added to existing data centers where heat output in certain racks exceeds the available capacity of the data center room cooling.

Cooling in the racks

In-row cooling units have been available for a long time, offering cooling systems that sit between normal data center racks, providing cooling for adjacent equipment. They can be used in a slab floor data center, or as a supplement to a data center cooled by airflow through a raised floor, or standalone to cool entire small data centers.

A few years back, rapid growth of in-row cooling was predicted, as rack densities were expected to increase quickly. In reality, the power density remained around 5kW per rack, which can be easily handled by room-level cooling, leaving in-row cooling as a niche product.

Now, predictions of a surge in power density are back, this time caused by a projected jump in the use of HPC, AI and other technologies, in particular those running on GPUS and high-end CPUs.

"The trend toward modernization and consolidation of data centers is driving the need for a cooling solution that provides more cooling capacity in a smaller footprint and flexible capacity to adapt to the actual data center load," says Schneider's announcement.

The new product is a 300mm-wide slice of equipment, with up to three times the capacity of previous models, freeing up space for IT equipment, and has a variable speed drive compressor, so the cooling output can be tuned to match the actual thermal demand at any time. It has a control panel screen and is ready for management by EcoStruxure, which allows smartphone control and gives access to online support and remote diagnostics.