Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

A leading player in the modular data center market, SGI recently announced an important enhancement in its line of ICE Cube modular data centers (MDCs), in form of SGI ICE Cube Air.

SGI has been deploying the ICE Cube product line globally. ICE Cube MDCs have remained preferred choice for commercial, industrial and government applications where mobility is of prime concern.  According to its maker, the standard ICE Cube line is the densest and most flexible family of ISO container-based MDCs on the market today.

Available in 20- and 40-foot length containers, these MDCs feature single- or dual-row designs along with universal configurations capable of achieving extreme density with PUE ratios of less than 1.12, utilizing a unique chilled-water technology that reduces cooling costs by as much as 80 percent over traditional data centers.

According to the industry watchers, SGI ICE Cube Air makes a significant value addition to SGI’s line of ICE Cube modular data centers (MDCs). ICE Cube Air is SGI's third generation product, representing four years of MDC design and deployment experience. According to SGI, with some breakthrough benefits, ICE Cube Air is going to set a new MDC industry standard.

The company summarized the benefits of its new generation of ICE Cube MDC:

• HVAC completely eliminated
• Operational within hours
• Starting price of $99,000
• Elimination of costly and complex connections

With highly efficient fans, along with an innovative three-stage evaporative cooling system, ICE Cube Air runs globally with air and evaporative cooling, achieving power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of less than 1.06.

Capable of housing up to four compute racks, the new ICE Cube Air MDC expands in standard increments out to 80 racks/97,920 cores/143.36 PB.

Supplemental direct expansion (DX), or chilled water cooling coils, provides an optional cooling system for customers deploying in extreme environments. Using one percent of the water needed by standard water-chilled containers and requiring a water flow of only two gallons per minute, ICE Cube Air can get its water from almost any clean source, including a garden hose.

“By offering a standard array of small, medium and large configure-to-order data center designs, customers benefit from a supply chain that will allow them to quickly expand as their business needs grow, regardless of scale. We now have three targeted design solutions backed by our global delivery of full service standard or design-to-order modular data centers,” senior director of Modular Data Center Engineering at SGI.Patrick Yantz noted in a statement.

In the press release, SGI announced that the ICE Cube Air is currently available with prices starting at $99,000.

Few months back, this year, TMCnet reported that DREM installed a high performance computing (HPC) and large-scale storage solution from SGI in its Brisbane facility. The SGI solutions are architectured on its SGI Altix ICE 8200 and InfiniteStorage technology. The solutions were going to help DREM in the processing of computationally intensive environmental modeling applications.