Alibaba has agreed to share its newly developed immersion data centre cooling technology with the Open Compute Project (OCP).
The Chinese e-commerce giant said in an announcement that it has been developing green data centre technology, with the latest development being the immersion cooling tech.
According to Alibaba, data centres which deploy immersion cooling are able to significantly reduce energy consumption and also lower operation costs by 20%.
Alibaba’s cooling tech is designed to absorb the heat of the components before it is then turned into gas and then changed to liquid that is stored in the main cabinet for reuse.
The technology can be deployed worldwide and delivers space savings of up to 75%, also improving computing density as the power usage efficiency (PUE) reaches to a low rate of 1.0. According to the company, this also beats the current worldwide industry average.
Read more:The power of Facebook: What the data centre world can learn from Open Compute
Alibaba recently joined OCP as a Platinum member and upon joining, the company says it will regularly share its data centre technology designs with the community. This includes over 200 members such as Facebook, Google, Cisco and more.
The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a community set up by Facebook to enable companies to share their data centre designs amongst themselves. It gives members of the project the ability to put forth their data centre technologies, and also use products offered by the other members.
In a statement, Shanyuan Gao, Chief architect, Alibaba Infrastructure Services said: “We look forward to collaborating with OCP and its members around the world to drive the development and adoption of further technological breakthroughs intended to deliver an even greater impact for the industry, and we already have plans to contribute our innovations to OCP.”
Alibaba built the first data centre in China in 2015, which uses water-cooling technology at scale from the Qiandao Lake. The company also recently announced its forthcoming opening of its first data centre in India, expected to launch by the end of March 2018.
These are examples of Alibaba’s push into the cloud computing market, and with the development of new technologies, the company is able to spread deployment of its data centre designs at a large scale.
