IBM Heat Exchanger Door.
 

Has anyone deployed IBM Cool Blue water-cooled heat exchanger door?

What is your opinion of this precision cooling solution?

Why did you choose IBM instead of Lieber, Knurr, APC, Sanmina presicion cooling solution?


Regards

YPD

Hi,

Inside Cool Blue, sealed tubes filled with circulating chilled water remove up to 55 percent of the heat -- dissipating as many as 50,000 BTUs -- that's generated in a fully populated rack. The four-inch-thick Cool Blue targets datacenters that have reached their cooling limits with traditional air conditioning. By adding the unit, said IBM, racks can be fully populated.

Also, you might to check following article which is analyzed by AFCOM.
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwar...103144,00.html


thanks
arnold

I have evaluated a number of solutions for hot spots in the data center environment. We have known for a long time that eventually heat densities in individual racks (and in data centers as a whole) would reach the point where air is simply not efficient enough as a heat transfer medium to remove all the heat generated by the servers. Clearly, for some, that day is here. Try and put 10-15kw of servers in a single rack and you will quickly see what I mean. No amount of rerouting airflow or hot aisle/cold aisle is going to help for long.
The problems with the chilled water racks or chilled water heat exchanger doors are the same regardless of manufacturer. They all require that I, a) have a chilled water system already in place and b) that I reroute chilled water to individual racks. That makes for a serious retrofit. Can you imagine plumbers installing new chilled water pipes, cutting, welding and brazing under your raised floor? The idea doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling. The idea is terrific if you are building a new facility and can get the chill water pipe in before you populate the data center. I wouldn't build a new one today without this feature.
A better idea for a retrofit is a refrigerated rack. You still have issues with power requirements, humidity, condensate etc... but at least "Bubba" isn't in my data center with an acetylene torch.

mother-in-law
 

Hey - my mother in law is cold as ice - perhaps I could rent her out as a portable cooling solution?


(ok bad joke)

I agree about having Bubba in your datacenter under the floor... not a pretty picture.

In our offices long before we outsourced much of the datacenter work we ended up using a portable cooling / air conditioner... it was not the best option --- and doubt it would work for your needs ---

is it possible to break apart the servers in the racks and dispurse them around... I know that sort of defeats the purpose of having a 42U rack or 2 or 30 ... but it may help youget by until something better comes along...

Well, pipe can be fabricated off-site and victaulic fittings can be used in place of welded, but it's still water near your equipment and that makes most equipment owners nervous. I'd expect Liebert to announce a waterless rack-back solution soon, as part of their Extreme Density product line, which has a coolant distribution unit that circulates refrigerant, instead of water.

Actually I wonder if Alcohol is a conductor like water, if it isn't that may well make for a good solution to water providing you can sort certain other issues like the fact alcohol is flammable.

A little off topic but,
Alcohol is usually slightly conductive. It really depends on what you mean by alcohol. Isopropal, Isobutyl, Ethyl, Benzyl, M-propal, Jack Daniels, etc...they all have different conductivity.
Curiously, distilled water is not conductive. Chill water contains glycol and that makes it slightly conductive.
Hostmedic, before you ask, mothers-in-law are not conductive. However, they are flammable. Especially when mixed with alcohol.

Sure enough, here's an announcement for Liebert's CoolFrame in conjunction with Egenera, whose blade servers employ a rack/chassis hybrid. In this case, it looks like product development consisted of finding the right size sheet metal screws to fasten the rack-top units on the back.

The initial press release called it "liquid cooling" (even though it uses refrigerant), which is not quite the spin I'd put on it, given the general aversion to liquids in the data center. Maybe they're trying to associate with the recent IBM Cool Blue and HP Modular Cooling System announcements, both of which use water.

APC, where are you??

hi guys,

here is the newest of technology in datacenter cooling. I was told this by a little birdie. A company with the letters PAC, in no particular order has a cooling unit coming out that has 30 KW of cooling capacity that fits in row with APC racks to optimize cooling potential in a datancenter. The CRAC units as those guys call them are half the width of a rack and can be deployed around the datacenter targeting high density areas.

hope this helps....released later this month.

Here they are APC Infractructure InRow RC