Asperitas wins deal for immersion cooling for French bank Crédit Agricole Tier 4 datacentres

Immersion cooling specialist Asperitas supports the datacentre 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 datacentres to significantly reduce their energy costs and environmental footprint while preparing for a near future with more compute driven applications and where high density solutions are required.

‍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.

‍About the technology

‍Datacentres can become more energy efficient using Asperitas’ cooling technology, while at the same time reducing the space needed for the same IT capacity by directly cooling the hardware with an optimised liquid developed by Shell. The completely closed solution can be directly applied to existing datacentres. Asperitas’ solution is the only pumpless immersion cooled system, based on the natural convection concept, resulting in plug and play enterprise ready solutions.The technology also makes it possible for energy-intensive (future) hardware of chip manufacturers to continue to function at the highest possible utilisation rate. The latter makes the technology interesting for users of high-performance computing systems. A unique aspect of Asperitas’ solution is its ability to offer hot water-cooling, which makes it possible to cool datacentres, even in warm areas. The solution converts all electricity used for the hardware into a usable energy form: warm water of at least 55 degrees Celsius. This would allow datacentres to transform into suppliers of residual heat on a large scale, catering to the needs of many European regions where many datacentres are housed.

Notes for editors
For more information, please contact

‍Emilia Coverdale, Marketing and Communications Manager, +31611465021, emilia.coverdale@asperitas.com
‍www.asperitas.com

‍About Asperitas

‍Asperitas is a Dutch clean and high-tech scale-up, that has developed and marketed Immersed Computing®, a technology based on immersion liquid cooling to enable sustainable and high performing datacentres that facilitate all emerging digital technologies, anywhere and on any scale. In May 2020, the World Economic Forum published a paper on Transformational Energy Innovations of the last 10 years, selecting Asperitas technology as the only datacentre energy efficiency solution in their ground breaking paper.

‍About Crédit Agricole

‍The Crédit Agricole Group is the largest financial sponsor of the French economy and one of the leading players of Europe in banking. A leading European community bank, the group is also the leading European asset manager, the largest bank insurer in Europe and the third largest financial sponsor in European projects.

‍About Shell

‍Shell is a global energy company with 83,000 employees in more than 70 countries. Shell’s purpose is to power progress together by providing more and cleaner energy solutions. Shell Immersion Cooling Fluid S5 X is a synthetic, single-phase fluid, developed specially for immersion cooled data servers. The fluid is made from gas using Shell’s gas-to-liquids technology and can be used in natural convection as well as pump/forced circulation systems. Shell Immersion Cooling Fluid is designed to reduce energy usage through its high cooling efficiency, excellent flow behaviour and thermodynamic properties, improve product safety through its high compatibility with computer components and be safe and easy to handle while being more cost effective than alternatives such as fluorocarbons and intensely engineered fluids. The fluid has been co-developed with leading immersion cooling specialist Asperitas.