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Startup's Submerged Servers Could Cut Cooling Costs
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."
Until you have to try and RMA that CPU :)
the new Xeon 5600's run at less power than previous CPU's. and SSD's also run a lot cooler. how much does this liquid cooling enclosure cost and what is the performance compared to just upgrading your hardware?
HP is going to ship their Xeon 5600 servers starting on the 29th
..computers, allow me to label this a "fad"
The idea is funky, but to get good cooling you want convection (every joule of pump energy from a circulating pump gets transferred into the oil at yet more heat) which means deep tanks which means, to the server environment, goodbye high density.
The ONLY thing that has changed since I was doing this is the affordability of SSDs, which mean that now it is practical to immerse the whole computer, and the mass storage too, which makes things a lot simpler and cheaper, and means you really can be JUST oil cooled, not oil cooled mainly, except for air cooled HDs etc.
TOP TIP from an old hand.
If you are going to oil cool by immersion, buy the latest top quality hardware, because once immersed it stays there, you'll only pull it once to see why it sucks.
BIGGEST mistake experimenters make is using old hardware, cos you always end up playing with it, making mess, ahh fsckit..
Nota Bene if you are building one of these in anger, make allowances for the significant increase in the weight that the oil makes.
HTH etc
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
How much harder does it make doing standard move cables/switch harddrives/change components maintenance?
One of the advantages of a standard rack to me is that all of that is fairly easy and simple, so you can fix things quickly when something goes wrong.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
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.
A server with this Intel Atom equipped mobo draws something like 25-35W under full load. And the performance of these D510 dual core processors is comparable to better Pentium 4 processors.
I seem to remember mainframes using distilled water for cooling decades ago. Not being a member of the correct priesthood, I was not allowed in the mainframe room, so I don't know how it was set up then. I have seen how oil-filled systems work, and I would hate to work on one. Nasty mess.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!