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."

Comments

how much does it cost?

[alen]

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

As someone who HAS built & run oil immersed..

[GuyFawkes]

..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