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Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon
grease_boy writes "A UK company will start selling server racks submerged in oil baths within a year. Very-PC is working on prototypes and says that because oil transfers heat more efficiently, power usage can be cut by fifty percent."
It's probably not far off. Bear in mind that a lot of the 300W of your power supplies in each system is dissipated as heat. I've got a datacenter that's had water cooled racks installed (which as you might imagine, has horrific 'overheads' on installation, cableing and maintenance). At £5k/rack, + overheads, it was still a cheaper solution than standard 19" rack + aircon bill.
Actually, vegatable oils (natural ester fluids) have been used as an alternative dielectric fluid for several years now. A fair number of distribution-size transformers are filled with it, as it has less environmental consequence in the event of spills. It does have lower oxidation stability than mineral oil, so the system would have to be sealed.
Do data centers really use as much power cooling the server farms as running them?
More or less, yes. Efficiency on the A/C units is usually around 2:1 and sometimes approaches 3:1, that is you get twice the cooling as the energy you put in. Since nearly 100% of the power in to servers is expressed as heat, you need the same amount of cooling. Now add inefficiencies in the cooling architecture, power for fans in the servers, inefficiency of semiconductors when running hot, etc. When you add it all up you're approaching 50% of the total power consumption.
Its a disingenuous marketing claim though. Cooling oil is no more efficient than cooling air and convection won't be the final word at an industrial scale - they'll need pumps which consume as much energy as fans
On the plus side 10kva in a oil-cooled rack will be a hell of a lot quieter than 10kva in an air-cooled rack with a hundred 3cm fans running at 7krpm.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Looks like they had no clue then. Building size doesn't produce heat, building contents do. People are 300W each, and you can probably assume computers to be ~200-300W each, too.
...covered in oil. Some server admins are cute 25 year old women who work out every day!
The captcha word for me this time is "fondling". How strangely appropriate.
obligitory
You are right. It IS marketing propaganda. If you have 1.3MW of power used by CPU/motherboard/drives, you still have to remove 1.3MW if heat. Period. Using oil just lets you MOVE the heat easier (and quiter, and in less space), but that heat still has to go SOMEWHERE.
Of course, depending on the location, it might be easy enough to circulate the oil to cooling coils outside, but that still takes energy.
Given these guys obvious engineering expertise (not), I wonder if they have ever heard of Polyalphaolefin. Google "PAO cooling" for an idea. It is used for liquid cooling of electronics on military aircraft, and it seems very oil-like (at least when it spills). If it is good enough for the F-22, it is probably good enough for a web server.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
The design with the Cray 2 was a bit excessive. They just had the heat reach fluorinert's boiling point and there was a vapor collector and a condensor tower. As you'll recall, the temperature of a liquid will not never exceed the boiling point until it all turned to vapor. That's why car are water cooled. If you have insufficient heat transfer from the radiator, the vapor pressure blows the cap and you have a really visual feedback that it's time to stop. You won't damage anything if you stop before you evaporate all your coolant. Fluorinert boiled at 56 C, a convenient temperature that makes it safe to work around the computer. Oil boils at 175 C. If you have a few boiling racks you will not want humans in your server room and you'll probably burn down your air cooled servers. Oil cooled system will not used the clever technique used by Cray: no pump or other circulatory system was needed and working temperature was ultra stable. Fluorinert and oil cooling are completely different things and I don't think you can compare them.
Fluorinert does not deplete ozone! See 3m's website or Wikipedia.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
thanks for the backup. Some people...sheesh
It was Curly, actually. In one Three Stooges short, Curly was covered in oil (from an oil well he just discovered, you pervs), and Moe said something like "Whatcha doin, knucklehead?" To which Curly says "You know what they say! The oily boid gets the woim! nyuk nyuk nyuk"
The Hot cha cha cha was Jimmy Durante, and I just added that in for kicks.
The funny part is that this post will get modded informative. If there are any other jokes that need in-depth explanations, I'd be happy to serve.
blah blah blah
The fluid was Fluorinert and it was pretty expensive when I admin'ed the Cray II at NASA Langley back in 1988.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .