SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Nov. 17 — Aquila, in partnership with TAS Energy, Inc. of Houston, Texas, today announced a liquid-cooled edge data center co-development program featuring the first ruggedized modular edge data center developed around the Aquarius liquid cooled compute platform. This platform combines TAS’s industry-leading efficient modular data centers with Aquarius’s liquid cooled compute, switching, and storage to address the need for small modular data centers.

The program’s first product, code name Herma, provides the industry’s most energy efficient and compact edge data center solution. All products resulting from this partnership will feature extreme density, enhanced reliability, unparalleled ease of use, robustness, and enhanced security at the edge. Herma is intended to be the first in a series of modular data centers, which will be expanded to include additional racks with more compute power in a larger form factor. All of the units will be ruggedized, allowing computing assets to be deployed anywhere computing resources are needed.

“The Herma is a small, 8’x8′ data center that packs an incredible amount of liquid cooled computing and features state-of-the-art storage and network bandwidth based on highly reliable and well-understood HPC computer, storage, and network architecture,” said Bob Bolz, HPC and Data Center Business development at Aquila. “Aquarius racks provide high speed computing and tuned storage while saving an average of 250,000 kW hrs/yr and reducing the heat profile by as much as 30% in this application.”

Each 8’x8′ modular unit can provide 1584 E5-2600V4 compute cores, 9.2 TB of aggregate DDR4 RAM, and as much as 6.4 PB of storage, delivering 200 GB/sec or more of bandwidth, depending upon the storage technology the customer desires. Individual customers’ needs for storage space and bandwidth will dictate the computer solutions provided by Aquila. Herma storage is built on Scalable Informatics’ STAC benchmark-setting Unison technology. HDD, SSD, or hybrid storage configurations can be tuned to the particular application presented by the customer.

“The market needs flexible configurations tuned to edge applications,” said Jack Kolar, VP of Mission Critical Business, TAS Energy, in explaining his company’s choice to partner with Aquila. “We feel Aquila’s experience in HPC systems is key to attacking the edge data center problem.”

The large and centralized data centers utilized by streaming media and content distribution companies continually incur delays in providing content to customers. Latencies and delays occur due to the number of Internet hops from site to customer, and the problem is becoming more pronounced as the volume of media increases exponentially, more and more devices are connected, and the Internet of Things (IoT) creates more demand and stress on the network.

Edge data centers provide a regional distribution approach, allowing small, yet powerful, data centers to store the highest-demand content closer to the end customer. Using specialized algorithms, edge data centers reduce the bottlenecking and latency seen by media consumers furthest away from scaled out data center distribution points.

Herma will be available for shipment in the first quarter of 2017. Lead time is expected to be about 17 weeks from order to delivery.

Visit Aquila in booth 4478 at SC16 for a demonstration of their liquid cooled technology and a look at the new Herma product design.

About Aquila

Headquartered in Albuquerque, NM, Aquila is a 35-year-old employee-owned corporation with an ISO 9001-2008 certified manufacturing practice. Aquila has won awards as a provider of networking hardware and network security solutions, and is an award-winning manufacturer and technology transfer partner of Sandia National Laboratories. In 2015 Aquila and Clustered Systems teamed to respond to the Trilab CTS-1 procurement, which lead to the co-development of Aquarius, a third-generation Touch Cooling rack platform geared towards high density HPC and hyperconverged data center computing applications. For more information visit https://aquilagroup.com/aquarius.

About TAS Energy, Inc.

TAS Energy Inc. is a global technology company that designs and manufactures modular energy conversion and cooling systems for the power generation industry; district, commercial, and industrial process cooling; and the data center/mission critical sectors. TAS Energy specializes in high efficiency standardized product designs optimized for high life cycle return performance. Its product capabilities include generation storage and turbine inlet chilling, chilled water systems, and modular data centers and physical infrastructure. For more information visit www.tas.com.

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Source: Aquila