5 Fast Facts with Flex’s Rob Campbell
I recently caught up with Rob Campbell at Flex to learn more about how power and cooling technology choice helps yield improved efficiency to solution delivery in the market. As an advanced, end-to-end global manufacturer, Flex offers
the data center industry a unique combination of manufacturing, products, and
lifecycle services focused on data center IT and power infrastructure.
Rob is Flex’s President of Communications, Enterprise & Cloud. He oversees the team that supports leading cloud, data center operators and communication solutions providers to fuel the expansion of next-generation AI data centers, enterprises and communication networks. In the data center space, this includes hyperscalers, tier-two operators, colocation companies, and the solution providers that support them.
ALLYSON: Rob, thank you for being here today. Flex engages with some of the world’s largest cloud providers to deliver foundational technology to fuel the digital services we all rely on. Why is this moment so unique in hyperscale buildout?
ROB: The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) has broken the typical model for data center design and operations, and the industry faces a number of challenges around power, heat, and scale.
There’s increased IT complexity in the data center core and major power challenges at every level of the data center, and even out into the grid. Whether a cloud service provider is upgrading an existing data center or building a new one, there is a need to think about compute capabilities along with the entire power envelope of the data center. These dynamics are driving the evolution towards integrated systems and solutions.
Since every data center has different requirements depending on the mix of applications, size, and a variety of other factors, there is no one-size fits all solution. This means that the largest companies require customization in the various products and services that are part of a vertically integrated solution. At the same time, data center operators want more plug-and-play like deployments for speed and simplicity.
Finally, demand has been consistently high, unlike the normal variability we see in other industries. And companies have compressed timelines to deliver everything from new processors to greenfield data centers.
There are a lot of dynamics at play, and Flex is well positioned to support the industry to turn challenges into opportunities.
ALLYSON: When you consider the size of investment for greenfield data centers, the challenges in grid availability for greenfield projects, and the complexity of brownfield upgrades, how does a power and cooling partner like Flex work with customers to ensure the scale and speed of solutions to get data centers powered up swiftly and reliably?
ROB: A lot of companies are trying to support accelerated timelines for AI technology and data center expansion. They may have great technology, but they often lack the ability to deliver at the scale needed to relieve the pressure on these data center operators.
What makes Flex stand apart is the fact that we offer a portfolio of data center IT and power solutions combined with advanced manufacturing services across the product lifecycle for servers, storage, vertically integrated racks, and power products coupled with cooling at the board, rack and facility levels. We deliver scale and speed so companies can execute their ambitious AI and data center strategies and accelerated timelines.
We deliver a number of embedded and critical power products, but let’s use the example of a power pod from Anord Mardix, a Flex company. These power pods enable the rapid deployment of power capacity, which could be in a greenfield data center or to upgrade power capacity in brownfield data centers.
Our team designs, builds, tests, delivers, and commissions these modular, vertically integrated pods with everything needed to connect to the grid. We’re able to deliver 84% reduction in on-site man hours during installation phase and 75% reduction in onsite assembly and testing. This saves a lot of time and money. For brownfield data centers, you can drop a pod onto the site and increase power capacity almost overnight. For greenfield projects facing a shortage of construction workers, this solution eliminates that headache, among others.
ALLYSON: The metrics of power from platform to rack to data center are changing dramatically with the growth of AI server cluster deployments. How does this change the fundamentals of what you deliver to the market?
ROB: The rapid adoption of AI servers, primarily by hyperscale data centers, requires a different approach to how you think about power at the server, the rack, and the entire data center.
We have customers deploying 30kW racks today, and that will need to double to over 60kW in the near term and exceed 100kW in the next several years. This means we have to think about the rack as an integrated system where we consider factors such as server power density, rack power, and rack cooling. This means that data center operators are looking for partners that have the capabilities to design and manufacture a complete AI server cluster and deploy it at scale worldwide.
Our fundamental value is the combination of power products with advanced manufacturing and services across the product lifecycle, delivered on a global scale.
We understand the long-term trends and challenges and continue to drive R&D and innovation to help customers stay ahead of the challenges. We engage data center operators and vendors very early in their product development lifecycle, often years ahead of an official launch. This includes custom power modules designed for GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs and SoCs, as well as data center racks, power shelves, power pods and a host of other data center infrastructure solutions. We’re then able to deliver these innovations at a scale and speed that is unique and valuable to our customers.
Technically speaking, AI creates multiple ripples starting with the chip and cascading across the data center and ultimately the grid. Power consumption, rack density, heat generation, energy loss and grid disturbances are a few of the challenges.
Flex is focused on improving power efficiency and distribution, architecture optimization, and cooling. This includes ongoing architectural advances to place point-of-load DC/DC converters as close to the power source as possible for greater power accuracy, efficiency and latency. For most applications, the traditional lateral placement of a converter alongside the processor on the printed circuit board (PCB) is effective, and forced air cooling works well with this design.
AI is different. These AI processors and DC/DC converters need to be as close as possible to avoid static and dynamic voltage drops across power rail connections. A vertical power delivery (VPD) module, as the name suggests, places the DC/DC vertically underneath the processor on the bottom side of the PCB for optimum power transfer and minimum power delivery network losses. This design also aligns well with direct-to-chip liquid cooling with a cold plate alongside the DC/DC converter and the processor.
We’re designing power shelves to stay ahead of expected 125kW and 1MW rack requirements. We’re also looking at the use of different voltages and more concentrated AI clusters to better manage power demands.
Additionally, high-speed switching with GPUs can create disturbances and transients that affect power quality. This makes it necessary to manage these impacts carefully to avoid further inefficiencies. We recently announced Flex’s Capacitive Energy Storage System designed with hyperscale partners to balance peak power and protect the grid from line disturbances during AI training and inference periods. The solution includes state-of-the art capacitor technology from Musashi Energy Solutions.
These are just a few examples of the innovation we’re driving in collaboration with customers and the ecosystem.
ALLYSON: Cooling technologies are critical within this context as well. How do you see the change to liquid cooling, and how does Flex plan to play a role in this arena?
ROB: Liquid cooling has multiple drivers that are supporting the adoption and growth of liquid cooling technologies in the data center. For example, rising rack power densities have already exceeded the ability for traditional air cooling at the server and rack level, and are driving innovation in cooling technologies. Also, large data centers have seen marginal improvements in efficiency with the current cooling technology and are looking to innovate and re-architect data center designs to meet their sustainability goals.
Flex has over a decade of experience in liquid cooling, and we continue to invest in liquid cooling technologies to provide our customers with innovative power and cooling solutions that support their large-scale deployments of AI server clusters. Liquid cooling is a critical part of the Flex strategy to be the partner of choice for our data center customers, and complements our existing portfolio of critical power, embedded power, mechanicals, and IT infrastructure products and services.
ALLYSON: Where can our readers find out more about Flex solutions in this space and engage the Flex team to learn more?
ROB: Visit our website at www.flex.com and if you’re attending the OCP Global Summit, stop by booth A11.
I recently caught up with Rob Campbell at Flex to learn more about how power and cooling technology choice helps yield improved efficiency to solution delivery in the market. As an advanced, end-to-end global manufacturer, Flex offers
the data center industry a unique combination of manufacturing, products, and
lifecycle services focused on data center IT and power infrastructure.
Rob is Flex’s President of Communications, Enterprise & Cloud. He oversees the team that supports leading cloud, data center operators and communication solutions providers to fuel the expansion of next-generation AI data centers, enterprises and communication networks. In the data center space, this includes hyperscalers, tier-two operators, colocation companies, and the solution providers that support them.
ALLYSON: Rob, thank you for being here today. Flex engages with some of the world’s largest cloud providers to deliver foundational technology to fuel the digital services we all rely on. Why is this moment so unique in hyperscale buildout?
ROB: The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) has broken the typical model for data center design and operations, and the industry faces a number of challenges around power, heat, and scale.
There’s increased IT complexity in the data center core and major power challenges at every level of the data center, and even out into the grid. Whether a cloud service provider is upgrading an existing data center or building a new one, there is a need to think about compute capabilities along with the entire power envelope of the data center. These dynamics are driving the evolution towards integrated systems and solutions.
Since every data center has different requirements depending on the mix of applications, size, and a variety of other factors, there is no one-size fits all solution. This means that the largest companies require customization in the various products and services that are part of a vertically integrated solution. At the same time, data center operators want more plug-and-play like deployments for speed and simplicity.
Finally, demand has been consistently high, unlike the normal variability we see in other industries. And companies have compressed timelines to deliver everything from new processors to greenfield data centers.
There are a lot of dynamics at play, and Flex is well positioned to support the industry to turn challenges into opportunities.
ALLYSON: When you consider the size of investment for greenfield data centers, the challenges in grid availability for greenfield projects, and the complexity of brownfield upgrades, how does a power and cooling partner like Flex work with customers to ensure the scale and speed of solutions to get data centers powered up swiftly and reliably?
ROB: A lot of companies are trying to support accelerated timelines for AI technology and data center expansion. They may have great technology, but they often lack the ability to deliver at the scale needed to relieve the pressure on these data center operators.
What makes Flex stand apart is the fact that we offer a portfolio of data center IT and power solutions combined with advanced manufacturing services across the product lifecycle for servers, storage, vertically integrated racks, and power products coupled with cooling at the board, rack and facility levels. We deliver scale and speed so companies can execute their ambitious AI and data center strategies and accelerated timelines.
We deliver a number of embedded and critical power products, but let’s use the example of a power pod from Anord Mardix, a Flex company. These power pods enable the rapid deployment of power capacity, which could be in a greenfield data center or to upgrade power capacity in brownfield data centers.
Our team designs, builds, tests, delivers, and commissions these modular, vertically integrated pods with everything needed to connect to the grid. We’re able to deliver 84% reduction in on-site man hours during installation phase and 75% reduction in onsite assembly and testing. This saves a lot of time and money. For brownfield data centers, you can drop a pod onto the site and increase power capacity almost overnight. For greenfield projects facing a shortage of construction workers, this solution eliminates that headache, among others.
ALLYSON: The metrics of power from platform to rack to data center are changing dramatically with the growth of AI server cluster deployments. How does this change the fundamentals of what you deliver to the market?
ROB: The rapid adoption of AI servers, primarily by hyperscale data centers, requires a different approach to how you think about power at the server, the rack, and the entire data center.
We have customers deploying 30kW racks today, and that will need to double to over 60kW in the near term and exceed 100kW in the next several years. This means we have to think about the rack as an integrated system where we consider factors such as server power density, rack power, and rack cooling. This means that data center operators are looking for partners that have the capabilities to design and manufacture a complete AI server cluster and deploy it at scale worldwide.
Our fundamental value is the combination of power products with advanced manufacturing and services across the product lifecycle, delivered on a global scale.
We understand the long-term trends and challenges and continue to drive R&D and innovation to help customers stay ahead of the challenges. We engage data center operators and vendors very early in their product development lifecycle, often years ahead of an official launch. This includes custom power modules designed for GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs and SoCs, as well as data center racks, power shelves, power pods and a host of other data center infrastructure solutions. We’re then able to deliver these innovations at a scale and speed that is unique and valuable to our customers.
Technically speaking, AI creates multiple ripples starting with the chip and cascading across the data center and ultimately the grid. Power consumption, rack density, heat generation, energy loss and grid disturbances are a few of the challenges.
Flex is focused on improving power efficiency and distribution, architecture optimization, and cooling. This includes ongoing architectural advances to place point-of-load DC/DC converters as close to the power source as possible for greater power accuracy, efficiency and latency. For most applications, the traditional lateral placement of a converter alongside the processor on the printed circuit board (PCB) is effective, and forced air cooling works well with this design.
AI is different. These AI processors and DC/DC converters need to be as close as possible to avoid static and dynamic voltage drops across power rail connections. A vertical power delivery (VPD) module, as the name suggests, places the DC/DC vertically underneath the processor on the bottom side of the PCB for optimum power transfer and minimum power delivery network losses. This design also aligns well with direct-to-chip liquid cooling with a cold plate alongside the DC/DC converter and the processor.
We’re designing power shelves to stay ahead of expected 125kW and 1MW rack requirements. We’re also looking at the use of different voltages and more concentrated AI clusters to better manage power demands.
Additionally, high-speed switching with GPUs can create disturbances and transients that affect power quality. This makes it necessary to manage these impacts carefully to avoid further inefficiencies. We recently announced Flex’s Capacitive Energy Storage System designed with hyperscale partners to balance peak power and protect the grid from line disturbances during AI training and inference periods. The solution includes state-of-the art capacitor technology from Musashi Energy Solutions.
These are just a few examples of the innovation we’re driving in collaboration with customers and the ecosystem.
ALLYSON: Cooling technologies are critical within this context as well. How do you see the change to liquid cooling, and how does Flex plan to play a role in this arena?
ROB: Liquid cooling has multiple drivers that are supporting the adoption and growth of liquid cooling technologies in the data center. For example, rising rack power densities have already exceeded the ability for traditional air cooling at the server and rack level, and are driving innovation in cooling technologies. Also, large data centers have seen marginal improvements in efficiency with the current cooling technology and are looking to innovate and re-architect data center designs to meet their sustainability goals.
Flex has over a decade of experience in liquid cooling, and we continue to invest in liquid cooling technologies to provide our customers with innovative power and cooling solutions that support their large-scale deployments of AI server clusters. Liquid cooling is a critical part of the Flex strategy to be the partner of choice for our data center customers, and complements our existing portfolio of critical power, embedded power, mechanicals, and IT infrastructure products and services.
ALLYSON: Where can our readers find out more about Flex solutions in this space and engage the Flex team to learn more?
ROB: Visit our website at www.flex.com and if you’re attending the OCP Global Summit, stop by booth A11.
