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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."
Bring a whole new meaning to Oil in a rack...... geddit..
*grabs coat*
That sounds like a step forward. At least, until you consider that anyone working on them would get coated in oil... and frankly, server admins coated in oil are really something nobody wants to see.
Do you want me to make the joke about "fried chips" or do you want to do it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I, for one, would definitly start lobbying for more female tech workers here!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
However, the main problem I see is connectors. Existing connectors have been developed to work in air, except for a few exotic types. Watertight connectors are designed to work with wet environment outside and dry electronics inside, not vice versa, but in any case existing technology would require standard connectors to be used entirely submerged in dielectric. Modern connectors have much smaller contact surfaces than they did even ten years ago, and the distance liquid would have to move by capillary action before breaking the contact is quite small. It's hard to see how you could do accelerated life testing for such a system, which means it could be many years before we know whether they are reliable or not.
I recall when doing research involving electronics in Fluorinert we had to make soldered connections in liquid. Contacts that were frequently made and broken could be pressure contacts, but that is quite different from the situation in a server. And if we had known of a cheap substitute for Fluorinert we would have used it. The majority of oils degrade quite interestingly - you wouldn't expect bacteria to live in them but they can and do if the conditions are right.
These guys may have a workable solution to all the problems, but I can't help thinking that technology will make the concept obsolete. How does the performance of an old Fluorinert-cooled Cray stack up against a modern server in flops and GBit/s of IO per watt? (Hint: Don't bet on the Cray.)
Pining for the fjords
Exactly, the website and business proposal seem very amateurish. They actually tried using motor oil before realising that by some strange, arcane and entirely unpredictable process it correded PCBs? Am I being too presumptive in assuming that these people know very, very little about electronics?
Why on earth they didn't at least think to use highly-refined mineral oil like transformer oil is beyond me. I mean, filling a server with motor oil? Are you kidding me?
Someone saw the Tom's Hardware cooking-oil-cooled-PC experiment that was published a while back, and saw an opportunity to make some money. They didn't realise that Tom's Hardware used oil because it was headline-grabbing, cheap, easy to purchase and --oh yeah-- wasn't being used to cool a server that had to be stable and reliable. That doesn't mean it's the best choice of coolant.
Hell, you could do it with purified water if you wanted to, but your uptimes might take a hit.
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.
Oily racks you say? You know this just might catch on.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
XXX#######
"Hello, I'm reviewing your application and I don't see any IT exposure in it at all, no education, no experience... what makes you think that you're suited for a job at a server farm?"
"Well, I was a fry cook at McDonalds for 2 years"
"You're hired"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fluorinert's ozone depleting.
Novec's a greenhouse gas problem.
Every other fluid in this class has the same set of issues, unfortunately.
They may be "clean" and non-toxic, but they're decidedly NOT environment friendly compared to oils-
and they're a hell of a lot more expensive than oils and not as effective at cooling things.
The reason why the fluids are used in the supercomputer industry is more the mess caused by the oils
on everything- and they're actively cooling the systems. Oils are actually superior to the fluids
in heat-transfer terms- it's why you have oil filled transformers for power distribution instead of
dielectric fluid filled ones. The specific heat of Novec is actually less than air's- the only advantages
these fluids have is that you can effectively move a LOT more of it quickly over a surfaces being cooled
without noise and you can refrigerate the stuff to below ambient to temperatures close to the freezing
point of water without condensation risks.
Oils tend to have issues with active cooling. Unless you're implementing vapor-phase, stirling cycle,
or aggressive peltier active cooling below ambient, you are actually better off with oils than the fluids
as they won't work as well at cooling- you'll be better off with air cooling.
This has been discovered by the overclock crowd and they have done a handful of oil-immersed PC's.
The main reason why you don't see a lot more of those oil immersed PC's is oil wicking
by the wires. Each point where a connector would be or a peripheral like a CD/DVD or hard disk is
hooked in has wires coming out of the system that will wick the oil or dielectric fluid out all over
the place. In order to deal with this specific problem, you'd have to resort to specialized sealed
header and other connectors for each edge case for SATA/PATA, VGA/DVI, etc. Those don't come cheap,
so the overclocker crowd tends to just resort to fishtank and similar plays for lan parties or
PAX/QuakeCon, etc.
So, in the end, it is a mixed bag. The oils are messier, but are actually more environmentally friendly
than the dielectric fluids- and they have a higher heat capacity and thermal conductivity in many cases.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas