Redfish Liquid Cooling Management

Overview

Redfish is DMTF's (Distributed Management Task Force) open standard for hardware management APIs. The Redfish Thermal Equipment model defines a standardized data structure for managing liquid cooling infrastructure — CDUs, immersion tanks, cold plates, and rear-door heat exchangers — using a REST API with JSON data models. The model was developed collaboratively by DMTF and OCP, with a DMTF-ASHRAE formal alliance (established 2017) providing the property naming foundation.

The Redfish Cooling Unit hierarchy: Service Root → ThermalEquipment → CoolingUnit Collection → individual CoolingUnit (CDU or immersion tank), with sub-resources for CoolantConnectors, Pumps, Filters, LeakDetectors, Reservoir, EnvironmentMetrics, and CoolingLoops. The model covers three cooling modalities: CDUs (L2L heat exchangers), immersion tanks, and chassis-level cold plates.

Release 2023.1 (April 2023) delivered approximately 80% of the liquid cooling model. Release 2023.2 (published weeks before the October 2023 OCP Global Summit) added redundancy modeling and additional extensions. The OCP Interoperability Profile provides machine-readable compliance specifications for the Redfish liquid cooling model, with an open-source validator that auto-generates compliance tests.