In 2018, a pilot project with Asperitas Immersed Computing® was installed for Credit Agricole, during which the technology was validated and met all their Tier 4 datacentre and enterprise standards, therefore being qualified to adopt at their core datacentres. The pilot project of the Asperitas solution at the Greenfield datacentre, the largest within Crédit Agricole, managed more than 40% of the bank workload in Chartres. The module was exposed to numerous weather fluctuations and performed exceptionally, demonstrated by the energy efficiency indicator PUE improving from 1.4 to 1.03 in the winter and 1.04 during a heat wave. Based on this success, the next step of the project is to now install multiple Asperitas modules in two datacentres, taking up a potential 150 square meters of floor space, versus the 6000 square meters of white space currently.
Rolf Brink, Asperitas CEO said: “I am delighted that Crédit Agricole, a leading global enterprise with high requirements for their infrastructure, has chosen Asperitas to support their datacentre scale-up. 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 datacentre performance, efficiency and sustainability, proving them to be a true ambassador of immersion cooling.”
The AIC24 solution with its award-winning technology, Immersed Computing®, 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 (free cooling up to 48 degrees Celsius) and fully heat reuse ready (more than 98% energy transformed into hot water). 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 datacentres and allows for efficient cooling regardless of the datacentre’s external environment.
Sundeep Kamath, Global Marketing Manager for Process Oils at Shell added: “We are very excited with this success. Shell is committed to working with our partners and customers to develop solutions that can help them decarbonize. Datacentres today consume about 1% of global energy demand and this is only expected to grow with exponential amounts of data being generated. This innovative solution offers the best of all worlds – increased compute performance, lower costs, and a lower CO2 footprint. Shell is deploying this technology for our own high performance computing and we are very happy to see a leading bank like Crédit Agricole has also chosen this innovative, award winning solution.”
Jean Buet, Senior Officer, Head of Datacentres, Crédit Agricole commented: “The immersion cooling solution provided by Asperitas allows us to increase the density of our datacentre without major work. 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.”
The multiple module installation is scheduled for before the end of 2020, with Asperitas working alongside Dell Technologies to provide integrated compute solutions.
