NTT Com Asia, Dell roll out new IaaS offering powered by liquid cooling

Data center and network services provider NTT Com Asia has teamed up with Dell Technologies to launch an on-demand High-Performance Computing (HPC) service in Hong Kong targeted at companies cranking up compute-intensive AI workloads.

The partnership involves coupling NTT Com Asia's direct liquid cooling-enabled data center infrastructure and managed services with Dell's advanced computing technology.

The two companies said the new HPC-as-a-service offering will include co-location, infrastructure hosting, computing servers and managed services, depending on the customer's needs. The use of NTT Com's liquid-cooled infrastructure will allow for high-performance computing deployments of more than 50 kW per rack, about twice the computing density allowed with air-cooled computing racks, the company said.

The service is geared toward those enterprises involved in life sciences, manufacturing, finance, AI and analytics, IT and software development, research and warehouse management. NTT Com Asia and Dell also pointed out that the on-demand HPC service could cater to companies that need to scale their computing resources to meet peak workloads for projects or short-term growth.

Citing a Cushman & Wakefield report in January, NTT Com Asia said that the demand for data centers in Southeast Asia and North Asia (including Hong Kong) will grow by over 25% annually through 2028. This demand is fuelled by the wave of generative AI and the need for more data processing capacity for cloud computing and enterprise needs.

NTT Com and Dell are touting that their new service, powered by liquid-cooled infrastructure, is potentially providing customers with cost savings. "Reduced electricity bills and a smaller data center footprint mean savings we pass directly to you," the company's website said.

The companies didn't offer price information or comparative data to back up their claims. While liquid-cooled infra does operate more efficiently and can allow for better use of data center space, the upfront costs of those systems are higher than the air-cooled variety, and the lifecycle implications are still being studied. "Unlike with air cooling, there is currently no industry consensus on how to attain concurrent maintainability or fault tolerance in a DLC environment," wrote the Uptime Institute, an IT and data center research firm, in a report last year.