Liquid Cooled Data Centres
April 20th, 2011 by johnRunning the data centres that provide the Internet’s content is a power hungry business. Between the power to keep the servers and their associated storage and networking equipment running, and the power to keep them all cool, a lot of energy goes into a reasonable sized data centre.
Unlike your home computer, the servers running in the cloud need to be online 24/7, and running at full speed. You don’t want to have to wait for somebody to boot the server every time you try to access you favourite web site!
With all those racks of computers running at full power all the time, extracting heat and keeping the servers at safe temperatures is one of the biggest problems a data centre faces. Typical data centres run redundant HVAC systems. In the same way that a server that fails needs a backup that can take over transparently, the cooling system in the building needs to have a backup. All that cooling takes energy.
Liquid Cooling
Liquid cooling systems for home PCs, typically aimed at the hard core gaming community, have been around for a while. They are typically replacement heat sinks for the CPU, and sometimes the graphics card, that have cooled water pumped through them. Not ideal for use in a large data centre environment with thousands of rack mounted PCs.
A new idea though changes the cooling fluid to a non-conductive mineral oil, and completely submerge the rack in it. The efficiency of the liquid at removing heat from the systems is much better than cooled air over the fins of a heat sink. Green Revolution Cooling claims their GreenDEF™ based system can save over 90% on cooling energy usage, and 50% on total energy usage (cooler running servers are also more efficient).
Better still, it is much easier to recover the heat energy from a liquid like mineral oil than it is with a conventional air cooling system. So that energy you want out of the data centre’s computer rooms can be used to keep the operator’s control room and any office spaces comfortable when it gets cold outside.
Downsides?
The most obvious problem with submerging your rack, or even individual slices, in mineral oil has to be the added complexity of making any changes to the hardware, or replacing it when it fails. Hopefully, for the operators at least, the more even cooling will help extend the life of the components enough that replacements are rare.




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