Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Startup's Submerged Servers Could Cut Cooling Costs

Posted by timothy on from the alliteration-alternation dept.

1sockchuck writes "Are data center operators ready to abandon hot and cold aisles and submerge their servers? An Austin startup says its liquid cooling enclosure can cool high-density server installations for a fraction of the cost of air cooling in traditional data centers. Submersion cooling using mineral oil isn't new, dating back to the use of Fluorinert in the Cray 2. The new startup, Green Revolution Cooling, says its first installation will be at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (also home to the Ranger supercomputer). The company launched at SC09 along with a competing liquid cooling play, the Iceotope cooling bags."

2 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Or by sabs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Until you have to try and RMA that CPU :)

  2. Re:As someone who HAS built & run oil immersed by eln · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There are other ways to make data center cooling more efficient, such as hot aisle containment and individual rack-top coolers blowing cold air directly in front of the racks. There's no reason a modern data center needs to move entire buildings full of air anymore, even without liquid cooling.

    Oil immersion may or may not be more efficient, but it doesn't seem like it would scale well. In a large data center where some hardware component is failing on a daily basis, because you have tens of thousands of servers, keeping all that oil contained within the enclosures would be a major challenge. During maintenance, that stuff is going to be getting all over everything, including the tech, who can easily spread it all over anything he touches before he gets around to cleaning up. You'd need a cleaning crew out on the floor constantly.