Redfish-inside PLCs — driven by Unitronics — are reshaping cooling, control and DCIM integration. The data-center industry is approaching a structural inflection point. AI workloads, hyperscale expansion and liquid-cooled architectures are pushing thermal density, energy consumption and operational complexity well beyond what legacy control stacks were designed to handle.
Data centers are hitting their thermal limits
The signs are clear:
- Goldman Sachs Research projects U.S. data centers will consume ~8% of national electricity by 2030, up from ~3% in 2022.
- Frost & Sullivan estimates the data-center cooling market will exceed $18.5B by 2030, driven by high-density racks, AI accelerators and liquid cooling.
Heat is no longer just a facilities problem — it directly impacts compute availability. Cooling already accounts for ~40% of total data-center energy spend, and the margin for error is shrinking as rack densities climb past 30–60 kW.
Industry trends show that the highest-performing data centers are those where cooling control systems are natively integrated with IT management through a common management stack such as DCIM, eliminating inefficiencies caused by gateways, protocol translation, or middleware delays.
Cooling has become an IT responsibility
For years, data center architecture treated cooling as a separate domain.
IT infrastructure exposed health, status and fault information through standardized management interfaces. Cooling systems — the chillers, CDUs, pumps, fans, valves and sensors that require deterministic, safety-critical, real-time control — were controlled locally by PLCs, which provided limited visibility beyond the control layer.
That model worked when thermal demand was predictable.
It breaks down in environments where cooling must dynamically respond to fluctuating workloads, liquid cooling loops and rapid power changes. In modern facilities, cooling systems are expected to behave like infrastructure — not isolated machines.
They must:
- Provide real-time system visibility
- Integrate directly with DCIM and IT platforms
- Support redundancy and fast fault detection
- Scale consistently across sites
Most traditional control architectures cannot meet these requirements without adding gateways or custom integrations — introducing complexity, cybersecurity risks and slow alarm propagation.
The need for a common management language
IT systems already operate using a shared management model. Servers, power equipment and racks communicate health, availability and energy usage in a standardized format that DCIM platforms understand. Cooling systems largely do not.
Without a common language, cooling remains disconnected from the systems responsible for orchestration, optimization and operational decisions. This gap is becoming a limiting factor as facilities scale.
What is Redfish — and why is it becoming mandatory
Redfish, developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), is a REST-based, JSON-formatted management standard designed for modern data centers.
- System health and status
- Power and energy telemetry
- Thermal zones, fans and pumps
- Alarms and fault reporting
Redfish is web-native, stateless and aligned with IPv6 and hyperscale environments. It is already widely adopted for servers and power systems.
Until recently, Redfish stopped at the IT boundary. Cooling systems—controlled by PLCs—required protocol translation or external gateways to bridge the gap.
That boundary is now disappearing.
Why Redfish must exist inside the controller
Cooling systems are active, real-time control systems — not passive assets. They regulate flow, pressure and thermal response in real time. For Redfish to be effective, it cannot sit behind translation layers. It must be embedded directly within the control platform.
This is where Unitronics introduces a different approach.
Unitronics UniStream® PLCs integrate native Redfish directly inside the controller—alongside deterministic control, real-time processing and industrial communications.
When Redfish is embedded at the controller level:
- Cooling systems become fully visible infrastructure assets
- DCIM platforms gain direct access to real-time health and status
- Alarms propagate instantly, without translation delays
- System architecture becomes simpler and more resilien
Control logic continues to run deterministically, while Redfish exposes management-level data in parallel — without compromise.
A practical example: Liquid cooling CDUs
Consider a liquid cooling CDU supporting high-density AI racks. The controller must regulate flow, pressure, redundancy, and temperature while exposing system status to DCIM. Traditionally, this requires a PLC for control and additional gateways to translate data into IT-compatible formats. With Unitronics UniStream controllers with embedded Redfish:
- Real-time deterministic control is maintained
- System health and telemetry are exposed directly via Redfish
- Integration layers are removed
- Failure points and latency are reduced
The result is a simpler, more transparent architecture where cooling is directly visible and manageable.
Why 2026 is the tipping point
As data centers scale, cooling systems can no longer operate outside the management layer. If cooling is expected to protect compute availability, it must communicate in the same language as IT infrastructure. By the end of 2026, Redfish will no longer be optional — it will be expected. This is not just a feature evolution. It is an architectural shift.
With solutions like Unitronics UniStream Data Center controllers’ solution — combining PLC + HMI, native Redfish, IPv6 and built-in protocols such as BACnet, Modbus, REST API and OPC UA — the gap between IT and OT is already closing.
The bottom line
If Redfish is the language of the modern data center, embedding it directly inside the controller is the next logical step. This is not just another PLC feature. Redfish-embedded PLCs represent a conceptual shift in how data center infrastructure is controlled and managed. As 2026, draws to a close, Redfish will be everywhere. The real question is which platforms are ready for it today.
For teams planning next-generation cooling architectures, Unitronics provides a unified control platform designed specifically for data center environments—combining control, visualization, OT communication protocols and native IT integration in a single device.
