MHI to commercialize its new edge data center by year end

MHI plan to release the product to customers for trial operation for a fixed period from October 2023, and begin demonstration testing to support commercialization at the Yokohama Hardtech Hub (YHH), a manufacturing co-creation space on the grounds of MHI’s Yokohama Dockyard & Machinery Works Honmoku Plant in Naka-ku, Yokohama.

Shortly after, MHI plans to commercialize the new offering by the end of fiscal 2023.

The data center is the successor to the container-type immersion cooling data center that has been under development since 2021. Servers with different cooling methods for different applications (by power density) can be mounted in the unit simultaneously, accommodating a diverse range of servers and other devices for edge computing to process data at the edge.

“Data centers are a part of the critical social infrastructure supporting modern life and culture. In recent years, the demand for greater server capacity and more advanced data centers has increased,” says MHI.

“As companies shift data and processes to the cloud, advances in generative AI drive its widespread adoption, reducing the amount of power consumed to remove the heat generated by servers, and minimizing the impact on the environment have become important issues. Strong growth in data center infrastructure is expected in the future at an accelerating pace.”

The company notes that a space of 1.4m x 1.3m has been secured inside the container in a bid to improve workability when installing or removing servers.

For the demonstration testing of the data center, Dell Technologies Japan Inc. provided a server for verification, and NEC Networks & System Integration Corporation will verify the IT equipment installation and server maintenance procedures, according to MHI.

MHI Group says it will apply various cooling technologies and zero emission power products at data centers that utilize high-performance servers. Since 2021, MHI, KDDI Corporation, and NEC Networks & System Integration Corporation, have been conducting demonstration experiments on small data centers that utilizes an immersion cooling system with liquid to cool servers, and that can be housed in a container. The aim of these experiments is to establish practical applications for this technology in Japan.

Article Topics

cloud server  |  edge AI  |  edge devices  |  IoT