By: Chris Orlando, DDC, Chairman and Co-Founder
[SPONSORED GUEST ARTICLE] As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption rapidly expands, traditional datacenters are having major issues with keeping up. Datacenter operators and end users are becoming increasingly concerned about capacity availability and hyperscale purchasing that’s crowding enterprises out of the market. Many datacenter operators plan to reconfigure their sites to accommodate more computing power, higher energy consumption, and better cooling designs.
At DDC, the global leader in scalable datacenter-to-edge solutions, we are taking an innovative approach to building new and retrofitting legacy datacenters. Today, our patented cabinet technology can be deployed in nearly any environment or facility and supports one of the highest-density, air-cooled thermal loads—85kW per cabinet—on the market. In a recent deployment with TierPoint, a US-based colocation provider, we are supporting a 26,000 sq ft facility augmentation outside of Allentown, PA. This colocation site will now house 324 of the DDC S-Series cabinets, each supporting 50kW of load per cabinet, with the ability to scale up to 85kW as workloads evolve.
TierPoint is a digital transformation leader helping clients solve their most complex IT challenges with state-of-the-art cloud and colocation services. Having deployed DDC award-winning cabinets in other datacenters across the US, TierPoint knew the DDC S-Series cabinets could support the unique demands of large-scale AI workloads and is the lowest cost to deploy of any competitive solution.
“Not only was it the lowest cost solution for us, but the future-proofing against increasing densities and the performance enhancements our customers see from the surgical control of the supply side temperature and air volume made it the obvious choice for this critical deployment,” said Keith Markley, TierPoint, Executive Vice President, Datacenter Operations.
What makes the job easier for TierPoint and the company’s AI customers is how DDC cabinets combine the efficiency of water cooling with the risk-free flexibility of air. The ‘better than liquid’ cooling technology supports variable density deployments, allowing customers and datacenter operators to build, retrofit, and upgrade their facilities cost-effectively. They can rack equipment as they have done for decades to meet the wide-ranging power and airflow demands driven by the unprecedented growth of HPC and AI workloads.
How DDC Delivers AI Anywhere
At DDC, we designed the S-Series cabinets as an affordable, flexible way for businesses to deploy AI Anywhere. We understand the specific pain points associated with deploying AI—including heat generation, environmental conditioning, and the increasing cost of network cabling. To address these concerns, DDC cabinets support extremely dense hardware installations, which results in smaller deployment footprints.
The platform can sense even slight temperature fluctuations and adjust airflow and temperature setpoints faster than any other solution on the market, supporting up to 85 kW per rack and ensuring rock-solid hardware performance 24/7, 365 days per year.
Since the DDC cabinets are fully self-contained, they keep the temperature of every hardware component controlled with surgical precision and without the need to cool the entire room. The cabinets can be deployed in existing datacenters, new construction projects, and lab environments—almost anywhere IT hardware is needed. While DDC makes complex infrastructure deployment easier and faster, the extreme density capabilities save space. Additional advantages include individualized fire suppression, security, monitoring, and efficiency management.
“DDC cabinets deliver much higher efficiency, they are easier to install and manage, and they deal with other problems like cabling lengths and ensuring the proper amount of airflow (CFM) per kW of electrical power consumed by the IT hardware,” Markley said.
The closed-loop, modular design allows providers like TierPoint to scale, adding capacity as demand grows. The cabinets also use less energy than other cooling solutions and create zero water waste. The patented DDC technology adjusts supply and return airflow volumes while precisely adapting environmental conditions based on real-time equipment loads.
To realize new efficiencies and capabilities, datacenter operators or enterprises can replace existing datacenter racks with DDC S-Series cabinets, connecting them to the same power and water cooling systems used in most datacenters. DDC cabinets are one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to build and augment datacenter capacity today. The solution is sustainable, supports future-proofing against increases in density, and delivers real differentiation for datacenter operators and their end-users alike.
To learn more about upgrading your datacenter, visit ddc-cabtech.com.
