Operational technology can be climate-friendly despite high performance

It is important to look at the OT infrastructure as a whole and to tailor it precisely to the requirements of IT.

The digital transformation is challenging the data centre industry. At Data Centre World in Frankfurt, Rittal, German Edge Cloud and the Lefdal Mine Datacenter will be providing answers as to how this can be achieved with a joint approach.

As the backbone of the digital transformation, IT infrastructure must be ever faster operationally while delivering greater performance. High availability is critical to the business. Applications based on artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning significantly increase the demands on processor performance and density in the data centre. This demands maximum performance from the cooling system. At the same time, the data centres should get by with as little energy as possible without the slightest compromise being made in terms of availability.

Can these apparently contradictory requirements be squared? At the “Data Centre World” in Frankfurt am Main, Rittal, German Edge Cloud and the Lefdal Mine Datacenter will jointly be providing answers. “It is important to look at the OT infrastructure as a whole and to tailor it precisely to the requirements of IT,” says Michael Nicolai, Sales Manager IT at Rittal Germany: “In the data centre, this applies to the interaction of the supporting pillars of rack, power, cooling, security and monitoring.” The data centre’s function must also be considered in the context of the whole infrastructure, including the cloud. “How a data centre must be designed also depends, for example, on redundancies in the cloud. As a provider, we have to be able to provide this consulting service to create the right solution for our customers.”

The selection ranges from rack, bundles, rooms and containers to the complete OT infrastructure and turnkey data centres and data centre locations and managed services. This includes all the services for the entire data centre life cycle from a single source: from planning and implementing to operating and optimising an IT infrastructure. In addition, private cloud platforms and managed services are provided by German Edge Cloud, as are data-sovereign industrial applications for the intelligent control of manufacturing processes.
The Lefdal Mine Data Centre shows how the energy balance can be further increased by relocating the computing capacity to a data centre with optimal natural conditions.

Lefdal Mine Datacenter: Climate protection and high performance
The Lefdal mine is home to one of Europe’s most environmentally friendly data centre solutions. The air-cooled and water-cooled capacities will benefit from the mine’s location on a fjord with constantly low temperatures and the supply of 100% renewable energy directly on site. With an area of 120,000 square metres, it enables the colocation of as many as 10,000 racks or 1,500 containers. In addition, the fjord water used for cooling flows through the data centre in an almost energy-neutral manner. The result is a guaranteed Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of between 1.10 and 1.15. With this infrastructure, the data centre is a unique location for especially power-hungry high-performance computing environments.

Rittal contributes to this by quickly setting up high-performance OTs in the mine. The basis is the RiMatrix Next Generation (NG). OT infrastructures can be implemented quickly and flexibly with this modular system platform. Whitespace or container solutions bring speed and reliable standards to the LMD’s OT infrastructure expansion. German Edge Cloud complements the services provided with managed services and cloud to form a complete infrastructure offer.