AMSTERDAM — Asperitas supports the data center scale-up of the Chartres site for French corporate financial institution Crédit Agricole. The Asperitas technology, based on immersion liquid cooling, will enable the bank’s data centers to significantly reduce their energy costs and environmental footprint while preparing for a future with more compute-driven applications where high-density solutions are required.
In 2018, a pilot project with Asperitas Immersed Computing® was installed for Crédit Agricole, during which time the technology was validated and met all Tier 4 data center and enterprise standards. The pilot project managed more than 40% of the bank workload in Chartres. The module was exposed to numerous weather fluctuations and maintained performance, demonstrated by a PUE of 1.03 in the winter and 1.04 during a heat wave. Based on this success, the next step of the project is to install multiple Asperitas modules in two data centers, taking up a potential 150 square meters of floor space, versus the 6,000 square meters of white space currently.
“I am delighted that Crédit Agricole, a leading global enterprise with high requirements for their infrastructure, has chosen Asperitas to support their data center scale-up,” said Rolf Brink, CEO, Asperitas. “The flexibility and simplicity of the AIC24 modules make it a highly scalable solution without having to change the environmental infrastructure, so this outcome enables Crédit Agricole’s next step in development to be quite straight-forward. Having multiple AIC24 modules in the France site will make a huge impact on their data center performance, efficiency, and sustainability, proving them to be a true ambassador of immersion cooling.”
The AIC24 solution will meet the demand for high-density compute on a system and server level for Crédit Agricole. The system makes use of the natural, convection-driven fluid circulation within. This unique approach enables immersion cooling to be both climate independent and fully heat-reuse ready. Making use of the Shell Immersion Cooling Fluid product, produced by the gas-to-liquids (GTL) technology from development partner Shell, the solution is suitable for the most demanding and enterprise-level data centers and allows for efficient cooling regardless of the data center’s external environment.
“We are very excited with this success,” said Sundeep Kamath, global marketing manager for process oils at Shell. “Shell is committed to working with our partners and customers to develop solutions that can help them decarbonize. Data centers today consume about 1% of global energy demand and this is only expected to grow with exponential amounts of data being generated.”
“The immersion cooling solution provided by Asperitas allows us to increase the density of our data center without major work,” said Jean Buet, senior officer and head of data centers, Crédit Agricole. “We can thus offer our customer a high thermal density solution that meets both their growing demand and the new technological challenges that appear with the new generation of IT equipment. After two years of observation in production, we decided to deploy this solution.”
