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Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yeah-good-luck-with-that dept.

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."

6 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting by LordPhantom · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. Oil Soaked Servers? by pandrijeczko · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do you want me to make the joke about "fried chips" or do you want to do it?

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  3. Depends on the admin by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Funny

    I, for one, would definitly start lobbying for more female tech workers here!

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    1. Re:Depends on the admin by suggsjc · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hold on, that actually might be funny. A beowulf cluster of oil covered female tech workers?

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  4. Problems: Connectors, HDD,degradation by Flying+pig · · Score: 5, Interesting
    They will have to run the HDDs outside the oil because they do, in fact, need ventilation. Though perhaps you can get totally sealed HDDs from somewhere by now.

    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.)

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  5. Re:Heh by thoughtlover · · Score: 5, Funny

    Awww... I thought you were going to point us to a clip of C3PO being lowered into his oil bath. That's almost like a server soaked in oil, yeah?

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