Market Trends of Japan Data Center Cooling Industry
Liquid-based Cooling is The Fastest Growing Segment
- Technological advances have made liquid cooling easier to maintain, more scalable, and more affordable, reducing data center liquid consumption by more than 15% in tropical climates and by 80% in greener areas. The energy used for liquid cooling can be recycled to heat buildings and water, and advanced artificial refrigerants can effectively reduce the carbon footprint of air conditioners.
- Some Japanese companies already use snow as a coolant for at least several months of the year. Based in Niigata prefecture on Japan's north coast, DataDock Inc. cools its servers in Nagaoka City with snowmelt and cold outside air.
- Japanese data center providers KDDI and NTT DATA are researching immersion technology to significantly reduce energy waste in cooling server hardware. In KDDI's field test, we achieved an astounding result of reducing power consumption during temperature control by 94% compared to conventional air cooling systems. KDDI said IT equipment is often thought of as the biggest consumer of power, but about half of the total power consumption in data centers is used for cooling.
- Direct liquid cooling (DLC) solutions can achieve partial power usage effectiveness (PUE) values ranging from 1.02 to 1.03, surpassing the efficiency of even the most advanced air cooling systems by a low single-digit margin. It is important to note, however, that PUE does not account for a significant portion of the energy efficiency improvements attributed to DLC. In traditional server setups, fans are responsible for power consumption within the server rack, and this power usage is factored into the IT power section of the PUE calculation. These fans are considered an integral part of the data center's overall energy consumption.
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IT & Telecommunication is the Largest Segment
- Japan is home to major ICT organizations such as Sony, Panasonic, Fujitsu, NEC, and Toshiba, which continue to play a key role in the country's expansion as a major center for ICT. In addition, the orderly development of numerous modernization and expansion projects in the country, along with increasing government spending on maintaining high-quality and advanced infrastructure, are also driving the growth of the market.
- Global cloud service providers that generate big data, represented by mega-cloud platformers, are investing in data center in Japan. On the other hand, traditional enterprise data centers (or enterprise DCs) are in steady demand by mainstream companies. This is due to the growth in public cloud services. Public cloud services don’t require large-scale infrastructure investments, are typically stable in operation, and provide scalability and robustness.
- In Japan, the growth of PaaS and IaaS is particularly noteworthy. Low barriers to adoption characterize both due to their low capital investment burden. The fact that they can be used as needed may also be a factor in accelerating their adoption by enterprises. According to Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, as for the public cloud services model, based on data collected from a sample of 1,042 businesses, 60.0% of companies using PaaS solutions use AWS (Amazon Web Services), followed by Azure (Microsoft Azure) at 48.2%, and GCP (Google Cloud Platform) at 28.8%. Among all IaaS users, AWS accounted for 54.7%, Azure 44.0%, and GCP 26.2%. Therefore, the data center computing capacity is increasing which would further accelerate the demand for advance cooling technology in Japan.
