Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Danfoss partner to curb data center energy consumption and reuse excess heat

To mitigate these challenges, IT leaders and data center facility operators are taking action to reduce energy usage, such as implementing modern power-efficient capabilities and improved cooling systems. Excess heat in the European Union alone represents an estimated 2,860 TWh/y, almost equals to the EU’s total energy demand for heat and hot water in residential and service sector buildings[3]. The flow of excess heat from data centers is uninterruptible and therefore constitutes a very reliable source of clean energy.

Jürgen Fischer, President, Danfoss Climate Solutions, said: 

“Our strategic partnership with HPE is a great example of how we revolutionize building and decarbonizing the data center industry together with customers. With this latest cross-industry partnership we’re building the blueprint for the next generation of sustainable datacenters – using technologies available today”.

Benefits and agility of modularity

HPE’s MDC incorporates direct liquid cooling (DLC) technologies to enhance energy efficiency by over 20% and optimize energy production and distribution, leading to notable energy savings. The design’s compactness minimizes energy loss by reducing the distance for energy and cooling fluid transport and maximizes the temperature differential at the inlet and outlet, which promotes the capture of excess heat. Furthermore, the MDC’s agility and the exclusion of heavy industrial materials negate the need for costly, conventional building materials and substantially reduces the time to market. Deployment can be achieved three times quicker than with traditional data centers, decreasing from 18 months to as few as 6 months. Finally, the reduced land footprint and flexibility of the MDCs allow for placement in proximity to data generation sites, which diminishes the energy impact and bottlenecks associated with complex networking solutions and data transfer, while also supporting enhanced data governance and security.

Sue Preston, Vice President & General Manager, WW Advisory & Professional Services & Managed Services, HPE, said: 

“At HPE, we believe in the power of collaboration to create transformative solutions. Our partnership with Danfoss brings together HPE’s innovative modular data center with Danfoss’ groundbreaking heat reuse technology. Together, we are not just adding value; we are multiplying it. By harnessing the typically untapped resource of waste heat, turning waste into worth, showing the future of energy usage is efficient, intelligent, and, most importantly, achievable now.”

With unparalleled density, HPE’s modular data centers offer an impressive power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.1[4] in contrast to the PUE of 1.3 to 1.4 typically associated with the best modern designs of traditional brick-and-mortar data centers. Capable of handling the most power-demanding architectures like HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4000, HPE’s modular data center is the adequate architecture for mission critical and compute intensive workloads like supercomputing and generative AI, enabling scientists, universities, and enterprises to achieve faster outcomes.

From chip to chiller: driving innovation in decarbonization

To leverage excess heat – one of the largest untapped sources of energy and the largest potential for data centers across Europe, HPE has partnered up with Danfoss as their decarbonization partner. The strategic partnership takes advantage of Danfoss’ extensive product portfolio of energy-efficient solutions to drive innovation, support decarbonization and build the blueprint for the next generation of sustainable modular data centers.

HPE IT Sustainability Services – Data Center Heat Recovery is inspired by how Danfoss is already using heat reuse technology at its own headquarters campus in Denmark. Here, the heat is recovered from Danfoss’ onsite data center, boosted by a heat pump, and re-used in surrounding buildings to provide space heating. The heat can also be fed into the local district heating network to provide a renewable heat source to local residents. Reusing heat is a major part of Danfoss’ own decarbonization strategy which has helped Danfoss achieve carbon neutrality in the energy system of its 250,000m2 campus in Nordborg in 2022.

The new scalable modular data center offering leverages Danfoss technologies, including Turbocor^® compressors for heat pumps and chillers, heat exchangers, heat reuse modules, drives and pump skids allowing data centers to be cooled up to 30% more efficiently while recovering and reusing excess heat. It’s a modular solution with components that work together seamlessly and includes two technology stack options with a heat recovery system, including hydronic heat recovery heat exchanger and water-water heat pump, recovering heat from an air-cooled edge-to-cloud modular data center today and potentially second phase liquid cooled HPC modular data center.

As part of its holistic “Reduce, Reuse, Resource” approach, Danfoss also partners with HPE to retire its end-of-use IT assets through HPE Asset Upcycling Services, a circular economy solution that enables technology refurbishment and reuse, while recovering economic value from those assets.

Availability

HPE IT Sustainability Services – Data Center Heat Recovery is available to order immediately.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions as a service.  With offerings spanning Cloud Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent Edge, Software, and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, helping customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.

Media Contacts:

Jonna Senger

senger@danfoss.com

Benjamin Lesueur

benjamin.lesueur@hpe.com

1. Excess heat, also called surplus heat or waste heat, can be reused through existing and well-proven technologies, most notably heat pumps. Excess heat - Danfoss Impact Issue no. 2

2. Electricity 2024 - Analysis and forecast to 2026 (iea.blob.core.windows.net)

3. Excess heat - Danfoss Impact Issue no. 2

4. When using Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) technologies.