Title: OCP TV – Rolf & Sundeep
Duration: 18:22 minutes
Description:
OCP TV's Laura Noland interviewed Eduardo De Azevedo from Shell and Maikel Bouricius from Asperitas who talked about their presence at the upcoming OCP Virtual Summit on May 12th - 15th.
The Virtual Summit is a rich, interactive experience that can be accessed from anywhere in the world, that incorporates all the key components of the OCP Global Summit, including keynote sessions, executive tracks, an Expo Hall with Expo Hall talks, Engineering Workshops, the OCP Experience Center and the OCP Future Technologies Symposium.
OCP TV – Rolf & Sundeep Transcript
[Background music plays]
No music
[Animated sequence]
No Animation
[Text displays]
It is an interview
[Conversation/ speech Title]
{Name of speaker}
Laura Noland - OCP TV's
Rolf Brink - CEO of Asperitas
Sundeep Kamath - Global Marketing Manager, Shell
[Visuals]
3 video screens on desktop showing the 3 speakers
[Laura Noland]
Welcome to OCP TV the newsroom for the Open Compute Project Foundation. I'm Laura Noland at the 2020 OCP virtual summit. Joining me today is Rolf Brink, CEO of Asperitas and Sundeep Kamath, Global Marketing Manager of Shell. Welcome to both of you to OCP TV.
[Rolf Brink]
[Sundeep Kamath]
Thank you, happy to be here indeed
[Laura Noland]
Wonderful, well lots to talk about today, so let's get started. First tell our viewers about Asperitas and Shell. What you do separately and then together as a partner?
[Rolf Brink]
Asperitas is an immersion cooling company based in the Netherlands, currently based in Amsterdam even, and we've been in the market focusing on optimising IT equipment for immersion as well as selling our immersion systems which are quite unique in many ways because we don't require any moving parts to circulate the liquids or our systems are thermally driven and part of our development focus is the sustainability aspect so one of the things that we're committed to is optimising IT platforms, compute platforms in such a way that they can generate high-grade heat and that is something that is in high demand especially across Europe but also in many other areas in the world.
What we basically make possible is the fact is we are enabling the transition from data centers towards energy producers in ways, so with our technology data centres can generate an output of hot water which can be directly inserted into district heating systems or directly be reused by entire cities and that focus on that high-grade heat also allows us to deploy our systems with climate independence in mind. It also means that we're very tolerant to high temperature cooling, which means it doesn't matter for the system whether it's located in the arctic area or in the Sahara Desert that depending on the IT platform exercise which is something that is quite unique.
[Sundeep Kamath]
Shell is a global energy company and our mission is powering progress together by providing more and cleaner energy solutions. The fact is everyone needs energy to prosper and the absence of energy limits progress but the way people currently produce and consume energy create CO2 and global warming. Cross industry collaboration we think is fundamental to helping society reach the goal of net zero emissions and at Shell we are committed to play our part.
Our partnership with Asperitas to us is a demonstration of this commitment. The global data centre industry as we know has been one of the fastest growing energy consuming industries and it accounts for about one percent of global energy demand in 2018 and it's projected to continue growing. The technology that Asperitas has developed helps to reduce the energy footprint of data centres by up to forty five percent by immersing the IT hardware in a fluid that's specifically designed by Shell for the data server immersion cooling technology. We believe this technology has fantastic potential to completely revolutionise this industry and it's very exciting for us and that's why we are we have partnered with Asperitas.
[Rolf Brink]
One of the things that we should highlight here as well is the fact that we are jointly developing liquids for the entire industry to use as a dielectric liquid with a global supply capability of Shell and also with a large focus again on the energy reuse, Shell also being an energy party. A global energy party can help with this type of sustainability developments for data centres.
[Laura Noland]
Wow, I was just listening to each of you explaining the partnership and what you are doing together. It's gonna have a huge impact on the industry. This is gonna be an exciting platform. The OCP virtual summit will be an exciting platform for you to really share this with the community even further so I'm excited to learn more for sure and I'm sure a lot of folks at the summit will be too. So, you are sponsored this year so why was it important to be part of the summit and in a more visible fashion?
[Rolf Brink]
Well it is important as it is a global event for all hyper-scalers and the main OCP event of the year. Asperitas is leading the immersion efforts in OCP and from this capacity we're also involved with the organization of the summit itself, so and there are good reasons for doing that because there's a lot that is happening around immersion technology. This year as well and especially in the upcoming year so it's really important to ensure that the industry gets together and start embracing the liquid merit message and again more importantly even the sustainability, much as that surrounds it because that is very tightly related to the liquid cooling message.
[Sundeep Kamath]
Indeed. At Shell, as I mentioned, the challenge we all face from climate change requires a fundamental shift in thinking and cross industry collaboration we believe. OCP is a leading forum where we hope to engage with the key industry participants to identify and enable the de-carbonisation pathways so that they can follow towards a net zero emissions future.
[Laura Noland]
What's the latest? What's happening at Asperitas and Shell lately that you can share with our community? Any big news, any big announcements coming up?
[Sundeep Kamath]
Shell has recently just announced our revised ambitions. We have significantly raised our ambitions in relation to climate change so our goal, which was just announced last week, is now to be a net zero emissions energy business by 2050 or sooner, which, as you can imagine, is not going to be easy. It is a challenge for an energy company, but the Shell/Asperitas partnership is a real-life demonstration of this.
We have just launched Shell Immersion Cooling Fluid S5X which is a fluid that is specifically developed for immersion computing applications and conditions. It's developed using our patented gas-to-liquids technology, so the base fluid that we use to manufacture this fluid is actually made from gas, it's not derived from crude. How I like to visualize it is that it's like putting Lego blocks together, so we basically take the gas molecules and we fit them together to develop the fluid that we need, so it's absolutely pure. It's absolutely clean and it’s of a medicinal quality. The fluid is actually a product of both our companies’ strategic fluid development partnership and there's lots of research and development that we have done together. This is again in line with Asperitas’ leadership role on the immersion cooling technology, the OCP advanced cooling solution sub-project and in line with Shell’s desire to support innovative energy solutions.
[Rolf Brink]
If you look at the joint development of immersion cooling fluid, I would like to add something from my perspective on that liquid development on Shell’s side with the GTL process, the gas to liquid process. One of the things that Asperitas has in the highest regard is quality. Quality of our systems are the type of requirements that we put in place for our own technology are tremendously high and the value that is added by the Shell liquids also relates to that quality level. The gas-to-liquid process allows basically the manufacturing over liquids on a molecular level, so with the Lego blocks that Sundeep just explained. We end up with such a high consistency, such a predictability and such a high stability of the liquids that it's safer than any other liquid in the market and trust me, we've tested quite a few when we've worked with a lot of them. But nothing has been able to rival with the Shell fluids in this case. The reason why that's very important is the incredible IT value, the equipment value and also the value of the platform that needs to run on it. Especially in our markets, those values are really very high and that's something that we need to protect and this is what this liquid is optimised and enhanced for.
One of the things that Asperitas is sharing as news at the digital summit is the open source chassis that we're publishing on (that we're sharing it with the community) that is also combined with a new and larger immersion cooling solution that we're launching now that will make use of the full potential of our immersed computing concept. The system offers full flexibility to OEMs and also the abilities with the open source chassis and also system integrators and end-users to facilitate high-density compute and OCP ready 21 inch server solutions. At the summit we're sharing our efforts on the open server cassette design for immersion and we're promoting the use of that. So, based on this open source chassis, we're also launching and announcing several new OEM relations and joint development projects with some very well-known vendors which are also part of the OCP domain.
We're focused on the sustainability angles as well and this is the immersion cooling fluid and the hardware that we're building are also building blocks just like Shell’s ability to provide renewable power and heat reuse concepts and this is what's driving us on acting together on the summit's here as well.
[Laura Noland]
Wow, so lots of news to share at the OCP virtual summit. You had me at “Lego blocks” because, not to take away from any of the magnitude of what you're talking about, because it’s very exciting and very innovative and I know that a lot of people want to learn more, but it was a great visual, a great takeaway to really comprehend something so complex, so we can take it away quickly of how it actually works, appreciate that. You're sharing a lot of course at the summit – lots of big news from you guys. What do you hope to take away? Because you're contributing quite a bit. What do you hope to pull back from the summit and take back with you?
[Rolf Brink]
Basically the opportunity to showcase solutions connected with the OCP activities on the standardisation of immersion cooling technologies and IT equipment specifications while supporting the large-scale implementation of immersion cooling technology by cloud hyper-scale, telecom providers and other OCP adopters. X computing is an area we see as a strong development driven by telecom providers and public cloud providers and OCP announced last year that we would see most growth in this area.
We are expecting to see a lot more exciting developments on this and of course sustainability is a global thing so being able to operate anywhere in any climate but also enabling concepts when it's in neutral data centres is an area we hope to see a lot more of. There's a lot of stuff happening within the OCP domain, there's a lot of other companies. Microsoft even announced the carbon negative angles and we're hoping to see a lot more of that happening as well. I think a hyper scalar environment is having a leadership role for the entire data center industry and everybody's looking at how they're doing it, what they're doing and that's something I would love to see and I hope to take away from the OCP Virtual Summit.
[Laura Noland]
Let's talk about how you got started with the open compute project. Why did you decide to become part of this community, as you're taking the relationship with Asperitas and Shell to the community. Why be a part of the community and what benefits you’ve seen from it?
[Rolf Brink]
Asperitas is driving a whole new technology ecosystem, not just a technology by itself. The technology can only exist in an ecosystem and part of the strategy is to grow that ecosystem. We're not only focused on growing a company and growing on market share, no, we're actually focused on growing the market itself. It's a fundamentally different approach than just trying to compete with your competitors, what we're trying to do is something different, to facilitate.
As markets grow, there is a lot that needs to happen and that needs to be developed to allow the market to adopt liquid cooling technologies at a really significant scale. It's required, it's necessary if we want everyone to make this a sustainable industry and since nobody was making any efforts towards this kind of scaling off the market itself and nobody was taking that leadership role to guide the industry to a different level, we've basically decided that we had to take that place. If nobody is doing it, let's just do it ourselves and make sure that we generate some basic standards, some basic frames of reference and do that in the community and do it together with people who are like-minded and who are interested to bring this industry to a larger scale and that is exactly what has happened for the several publications that we have that we have helped with and facilitated and some of them have authored or co-authored. That should help the industry to come from a joint perspective, to start operating on a centerline. That's also a fundamental part of our development approach where we've developed our technology for scale, so when it comes to standardisation and open innovation to make sure that's something that we embrace to make sure that it can reach its full potential.
Last but not least, many of strongest and closest partners are also part of the consortium and it's a great platform to share progress, just like we're doing now with Shell.
[Laura Noland]
So where can our viewers go to learn more?
[Rolf Brink]
We are at the virtual booth in OCP Virtual Summit. They can find us at www.asperitas.com and the Shell link from our page to Shell Immersion Fluid.
website summits where can we find you
we've got a virtual booth, to be honest we're going to be present at the virtual booth so that that's where you can talk to us. Speak with us learn more about us. Sadly, we're not able to showcase our systems live at the in a physical location right now due to the current global situation but on the Asperitas and Shell website you can find all information that you would like about the immersion cooling fluids as well as the exciting Shell gas-to-liquid process.
[Sundeep Kamath]
Shell will be present also together with Asperitas at our virtual booth. We are very much looking forward to present in San Jose in person but I guess you know with the Covid-19 situation virtual is what we can do for now and yeah come and see us there, lots more to come from a spirit isn't show
[Laura Noland]
Thank you so much for joining us today.
