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Dell To Sell Advanced Server Cooling Systems
Mitechsi writes "Dell has struck a deal with Emerson to sell advanced liquid cooling systems and services to data center owners. One type of supplemental cooling technology is called the Liebert XD. The XD consists of refrigerant-filled pipes that snake around the server racks in a data center. The liquid system cuts the cooling power load by about 30%–50% compared to other types of cooling systems."
Coors plans to sell advanced personnel liquid cooling systems to IT departments too.
It makes me XD.
It will be nice to start seeing these in our datacenters (hopefully sometime soon). Considering half of our servers are probably dell, that's a good 15k potential installations.
- Aetheral Research -
XD
Kill me later for this, but let me be the first to say:
"Snakes in a server room!"
*ducks*
You mean heatpipes?
"Oh boy"
What I'd like to see is integrated liquid cooling using the XD systems built into dell servers.
an article where i can't blame bush, blame americans, make a lame joke about throwing chairs or soviet russia. i can't speak up for linsux or apple. i can't mention iphone.
this is no fair. no flamewars and no limp idiocy because i have nothing better to say.
this is about actual technology. what's happening to slashdot?
liquid nitrogen cooling systems :)
Actually, I'm pretty sure I saw that on the Screensavers on TechTV a looooooooong time ago. It kicked ass.
So Dell is going to offer water cooling, ok great! Why call it "Liebert XD" ? What, it's not water ? Oh ok then. I don't care if you pump it full of $400/gallon fluorinert and have plastic fishies floating through it, it's still just liquid cooling, something that existed in the server room long before Michael Dell ever sold a single server machine.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Flood the server room with vegetable oil.
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One constantly reads of problems with heat and cooling at datacenters, and exotic solutions, which would all be solved by leaving every other rack empty and renting twice as much space.
This is North America. A data center, by definition, is remote from it's users. There is no need to place it in one of the three or four regions where square footage is that expensive.
If I were building a data center, I would select one of the empty Albertson's or Kmarts that recently closed in my area. I would pick the one in the suckist retail location to get the cheapest rent. With the whole center spread out, and three story high ceilings, you have a low enough density and enough thermal mass in all that air that you can run the AC full blast at night (when it is more efficient because the coils outside are in cooler air) and let the temp rise slightly over the day.
Instead, they are constructing several NEW data centers in my area, building from the ground up, and I know from friends who are working in the build-out that they are packing it in tightly. It is also hell to control any kind of fire in that environment, I guess that's why they have those dangerous people-suffocating Halon (?) fire systems.
Actually, Emerson is offering it (and has for awhile); Dell is just starting to resell it. Employee bonus for Mitechsi for getting story greenlighted!
You know those nifty heat pipes in fancy heat sinks?
Imagine that on a bigger scale.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
While it would do a much better job cooling then just blowing air around, it sounds like a nightmare to maintain, with coolant lines running everywhere.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"George W. Bush is the best president the U.S. has ever had."
(sigh)
George, aren't you supposed to be "idiotified" again by Vladimir Putin here in a few minutes? What are you doing posting on Slashdot?
The ZDNet article is, unfortunately, very scant on details when it comes to our XD (short-hand for "eXtreme Density") system. For one, they give the impression that cooling coils are water-based. They're not; they're refrigerant, just like a whole-house air conditioner. The specific coolers they seem to be referring to are the XDV, an 8kW unit which mounts directly to the top of the rack, and/or the XDO, which is a 16kW unit which hangs in the center of a cold aisle. Just like an air conditioner, hot air is sucked in at the top/side, run across the evaporator coil (cools the air, boils the refrigerant), and cold air is then shot downwards towards the front rack face. The hot refrigerant makes its way back to a heat-exchange unit (an XDC chiller or XDP pump), where it dumps the heat into the rejection loop. This could be anything from a building chilled-water system, to roof-mounted drycoolers, or even a subterranean geothermal system. For a better idea of just what the thing is (and to see lots of pretty graphics and thermal images), the family "sales glossy" lives here(PDF).
Why call it "Liebert XD" ? What, it's not water ?
Ummm, because it's made by the Liebert Corporation? And it's their "XD" line of products?
Is this the first time you've ever heard of branding?
You might as well ask: "Why call it 'Toyota Camry'? What, it's not a car?"
it's still just liquid cooling, something that existed in the server room long before Michael Dell ever sold a single server machine.
So? Cars have been around a long time, too. That doesn't mean I want to drive a Model T.
Anyway, the news here is not that there is a new HVAC product, but that Dell is going to be selling HVAC systems to datacenter owners.
Also, this system uses a gas/liquid phase-change cycle, and it operates on a different scope (zone and spot cooling -- doesn't get anywhere near the CPU), so it's really not like what most people would think of as liquid cooling systems for computers. It's just a way of getting the cooling closer to the heat source instead of blowing cold air around in ducts, such that your HVAC operates more efficiently.
Sure, this idea has been around for a while (though this system makes some improvements that are especially helpful for datacenter use). The news is that Dell is selling it.
Why don't we just start building datacenters in Antartica ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
"they're refrigerant, just like a whole-house air conditioner"
Technically, they're not "just" like an air-conditioner. They're (like the water based systems also listed under the XD tag) only a heat exchange system - there's no compressor (although they also sell some of those under the XD name). Rather than compressing the vapor before condensing it, they pump the liquid refrigerant after it has condensed, which has the advantage of not cooling it below the room dewpoint, so there's no dripping condensate to deal with, and no overly dried out air to re-humidify.
Anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that we're not doing a good enough job of ensuring efficient energy consumption and helping to contribute to a greener world? Those of us in the tech industry in our clean, white collar business casual attire (or 'vintage' jeans and 'retro' button-ups if you work in 'frisco), working in air-conditioned offices on cutting edge silicon sometimes seem to forget (at least, I certainly do) that all this wonderful technology is humming along because we still burn millions of tons of rocks on a daily basis.
The datacenter I work at is probably typical for thousands across the world: rows and rows of servers producing enormous amounts of heat cooled by industrial-sized air-conditioning units that run on full blast 24/7/365. We're located in a nice neighborhood in one of the most beautifully lush locations in Oregon. Yet somewhere in the midwest, a belch of noxious carbon-laced smoke has just been emitted from a coal plant to allow the wonderful place I'm employed to calculate another terabyte of data for another second. Many of my co-workers drive Priuses and other hybrid vehicles so they can sleep easy at night knowing that they've done their part to help our environment. I wonder how many of us think about the emissions caused by our IT centers?
I'm environmentally aware but I'm no environmentalist. Hell, I don't even drive a hybrid. But I do find an inherent inconsistency with the perceived high-techy, 'clean' reputation IT elicits and the utter lack of realization of where this energy comes from. I only took a semester's worth of physics in college, but if I remember correctly, all this heat that is produced is a sign of inefficiency and just a waste of energy. Logging into servers at my company and often seeing 5% CPU usage doesn't exactly fill me with pride either. I like this liquid-cooling idea as it sounds like it'll help improve energy conservation; but it is yet another reminder to me that high-tech is still nothing without the decidedly low-tech intervention of a man and a canary in an underground shaft picking out fossilized remains of ancient vegetation to power our wonderful toys.
Sigh... I'm trying to make it very simple because unlike you or myself, I'd guess the majority of Slashdot readers do not understand the physics behind phase-change cooling, dewpoints, ASHRAE envelopes, and so on. However, they are familiar with basic air conditioners, and when you get right down to it, that's really what these are, just with a lot more technology and intelligence.
Yes, this is OT, but I just wanted to congratulate Corgha on a well-delivered smackdown. It's rare that I laugh out loud at comments anymore...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
wow, you're a bore. is that the best you can do? you obviously have little interests outside of bashing bush.
I believe you're referring to Windows users, troll bastard! Besides, you only call people faggots to try and cover up the fact that you yourself are one.
... the server cooling system where I work -- it consists of a single floor fan positioned in the door of the server room.
We've had the Liebert XD system; specifically the chilled water'coolant' exchanger, and the rack-mounted XDVs (We were originally going to go with the XDO, but lacked the required ceiling height. It works well; we run ~10-25KVA per rack with them. (They add 8-10KW of cooling per rack, so these are supplemental to our raised floor forced air setup.
Of course, for those you should follow 'datacenter best practices' to get the maximum benefit; i.e. blanking panels, hot aisle / cold aisle, etc.
So Dell PC servers now have old fashioned, pipes-in-the-data-centre liquid cooling, while IBM mainframes do not.
We have come full circle, haven't we?
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
Liquid cooling is more effective, but where is the claimed savings coming from? The cooling cycle hasn't changed, they take cool refrigerant, expose it to heat, it evaporates, they compress it, spin out the heat, repeat. Every A/C in the world works this way. All they have done is change the 'cooling fluid' from air to refrigerant. The same heat is generated, and it has to be pumped out. The reason IBM and others used liquid cooling in the olden days was that the specific heat of air is bad, it is better with water, refrigerant, etc. This lets them make the unit smaller and perhaps faster. And more efficient heat transfer keeps parts cooler. But this is not a green saving, the data center still uses the same amount of power. Where is the journalistic skepticism?
Coming from Dell, I would have expected an "Advanced Cooling System" to just be a really big fan.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The refrigerant-based approach is an efficiency disaster. Any serious datacenter is cooled with chilled water, or it is using double the watt/ton of cooling it should be. A datacenter that is not using water based cooling and some form of freecooling, which saves money even in climates like Phoenix or Atlanta in a 24/7 flat-load datacenter situation, should be sued for false advertising if they claim to be "efficient." There is benchmarking data available on this - a closed-loop dx system is an energy disaster, no matter how slick it looks. And don't even bring up "Well, they're just like a bunch of little chillers" until you find me a 10 ton* centrifugal compressor or an 80 ton rack (or 150 ton if you don't want to be locked into using a Turbocor compressor based unit).
The chilled water coil on the back of a rack is an excellent solution, and a good approach to dealing with the 12 kW racks that datacenter clients are starting to throw at us HVAC engineers. It is also something that has been offered before by IBM and others, and can be custom fabbed up if you have a large, controlled layout facility (co-los are too chaotic to pull off a custom solution in my experience).
As mentioned elsewhere, this is hardly cutting edge. Checkout the Datacenter Design Sourcebook here (I'm biased towards this since it summarizes my thinking as of last year and little has changed, other than a bit more data on the impact of speed controlled server fans impacting the operational approach to hot/cold aisles).
*1 ton = 12,000 btu/hr, I think in Burmese units thank you. And on a similar tangent, you'll pry Fed standard 209E cleanroom ratings from my cold, gowned hands.
No, this has nothing to do with heat pipes.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
You mean places like India?
Fiber optics are still constrained by the speed of light. Yes, that matters. Often a lot.
cool.
sometimes, nothing.
Congratulations on that (one-time?) 35% reduction. Seriously, that's a good job. Now, what's your annual server growth rate? How about growth rate in power and cooling? Are the CPU wattages declining? No? "Joey, ever hear of a mainframe?"
Yes, I'm in the Columbus area, but we've actually got four facilities here, plus another in Delaware (about half an hour north). The Liebert / Emerson cultural dichotomy you mention is prevalent in many aspects of what we do; not just with internal IT, but in many "outward facing" areas as well. I believe there's still a large photo of Ralph Liebert (the founder) hanging high above the floor at the Dearborn HVAC design and manufacturing plant (where the XD products are born), and even though Emerson bought us twenty years ago, our 'liebert.com' addresses are only now being phased out as part of the overall Emerson branding process. A lot of people also still answer phones with 'Liebert' first, which usually gets a smile and laugh from long-time sales reps, and sighs of resignation from executives.
Of course there are several other very important reasons, but lets start there. I work for one of the larger Web Hosting companies in the country (we are actually global but that is another story). One thing you don't find in a back lot behind the K-mart is the top ten tier-one providers converging in one spot. The backbone needed to host things bigger than mom and pop websites is enormous and not readily available for most locations.
"which would all be solved by leaving every other rack empty and renting twice as much space."
Um, no. The thermal mass of stacking servers on top of each other is very hard to overcome, regardless of space between racks. You could, however leave a U (the measure of rack space) free between each server (like we do).
"and enough thermal mass in all that air that you can run the AC full blast at night (when it is more efficient because the coils outside are in cooler air) and let the temp rise slightly over the day."
Gee, wonder why no one ever thought of that. Maybe because you have _no idea_ how much heat a room of servers generates? Rise slightly over the day? Surely you are kidding. Adding two stories of empty space you have pre-cooled might buy you a half hour if you shut off the AC. Then you will have an oven, with servers kicking off left and right.
I can go on and address the rest of your points, but the more I think about it, the more it seems I'm responding to Fud.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Might I ask what your role is? I won't mention names here, but i worked with a couple good guys. Was only up there for 2 weeks, but split time between Dearborn and Huntley (I think one of the Data Centers and a training center was at this location). Really none of my business, but interesting seeing a post from someone i potentially ran into. Plus, it was cool to see how the Liebert's were built that I've seen for years in various data centers throughout my career. :-)
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
I hope that you are quite young, fella. You may have moment to wait before your predictions come true
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Became finally true?
Artur
Very informative article! Thanks for posting that. BTW, slashdot "adjusts" long lines by inserting spaces (to defeat page-widening-posts). I've made a link so others can just click and enjoy. http://www.pge.com/docs/pdfs/biz/rebates/high tech/06_DataCenters-PGE.pdf
....Siberian gulag cools data center.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why the XDV/XDO and not the XDF? And looking at the XDF, which should be a better match for Dell (14kW max?!), Lennart isn't keeping up with Rittal. The XDF is a water cooled or compressor based high density cabinet.
Anybody that tries to buy this stuff from Dell and just install it like a server is in for quite some fun!
Emerson appliances around Dell servers, eh? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
put it in the bit bucket
So it's not a water cooling system, it's a steam engine! Or at least the 'boiler' part of one.
The broader message is that there are alternatives that enable better efficiency at both the server level as well as the facility. This is essentially an endorsement of this cooling technology and you may see further endorsements of other systems. If you dig further into the announcement and get down to the supporting white paper, you'll find that it is a joint marketing campaign explaining the efficiency benefits of the XD system and the benefits at the server level of Dell's Energy Smart brand. Energy Smart is part behavioral and part "vendor sorting". By choosing an Energy Smart server you stand to lower your power 10-25% over a standard server depending upon your frame of reference. The "behavioral" part of Energy Smart is driving the user to a low voltage proc. The remainder is sorting of components we do in order to sift out the higher power vendor parts. Because of this sort, we also have the ability to lower fan power since we don't have to satisfy the needs of the higher power components. So, if you compare the Energy Smart Server to the standard server with a low voltage part, you'll only see about a 10% power reduction, but that's also 10% you don't have to cool and 10% that doesn't get lost up the power transmission chain. I'm copying an explanation of the XD efficiency I posted to another blog earlier today.... I have a lab of these cooling units at Dell. As soon as I'm able to measure the chilled water used by the entire XD system, I'll be able to verify the efficiency claims that do originate from Liebert. In theory, here is where the efficiency advantages come from: by being located closer to the racks (either hanging in a cold aisle or directly on top of the rack), the fan energy required to draw air across the cooling coil is much less than it is to push a comparable amount of air through a raised floor air handler and through the raised floor to the vent in front of the rack. The coil units overhead are provided liquid refrigerant via remote heat exchange / pumping units. The system is tuned such that the heat the coil picks up from the IT equipment creates a phase change of the refrigerant to gas as it absorbs the heat. This method of heat transfer is extremely efficient and requires less refrigerant than would a water based heat exchanger that operates as a single phase heat exchanger remaining a liquid. The pumps in the XD pumping unit are smaller and require less energy because they are pumping less fluid. The other efficiency advantage is that the XD system is designed to operate above the room's dew point all the time. There is no condensation in any of the XD coils. Condensation and subsequent re-humidification, which is common in CRACs and CRAHs, is a big energy drain. And yes, if you happen to be fortunate to be located in a climate that enables fresh air cooling, that would generally be even more efficient. ASHRAE TC9.9, the group responsible for environmental recommendations is looking at the possibility of enlarging the recommended humidity ranges for IT equipment. If this happens, more of us can consider free cooling.