OVHcloud opens water-cooled DC in Sydney

Data centre operator OVHcloud has opened its third data centre in Sydney. The new facility uses liquid cooling technology for a more sustainable data centre design.

The water-cooling system uses a closed loop design to ensure that individual servers can be cooled with the equivalent of just a glass of water, according to the company. The integrated water-cooling system is built into a vertical rack designed to facilitate cooling at the server level, eliminating the need for air conditioning in server rooms, with significant benefits in costs and environmental impact.

Combined with the use of new generation Scale dedicated servers powered by the latest Intel and AMD processors, the new facility claims a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as low as 1.29 and a WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness) of 0.30 l/kWh, both of which are significantly lower than the industry average.

OVHcloud CEO Michael Paulin said the Sydney expansion, which comes off the back of recent openings in India and Singapore over the past 14 months, forms part of the company’s push to capture more of the valuable global cloud services market.

“The increased popularity of emerging technologies such as 5G, edge computing and generative AI has triggered an influx of demand for high computing performance, but many organisations are struggling to balance this need whilst keeping carbon footprints top of mind,” Paulin said. “As a pioneer in water-cooling technology for more than 20 years, we are confident in our ability to assist organisations in powering their businesses, and their ESG goals as well.”

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