Liquid Cooling

[vmlover]

I was reading somewhere that liquid cooling could be the wave of the future in data centers. It would reduce the use of energy resources. Does anyone know exactly how this works?

[ABurton]

It works sort of like a car radiator. The liquid is enclosed in a sealed container, but the movement of it carries the heat away from the equipment.

[raid]

Originally Posted by vmlover

I was reading somewhere that liquid cooling could be the wave of the future in data centers. It would reduce the use of energy resources. Does anyone know exactly how this works?

At present most servers (that I know about) are air cooled. Meaning that all hot components have heatsinks and fans to force air through the heatsink to keep the device cool.

Many years ago the early liquid cooled servers replaced the heatsink with a heat exchanger. In this case it looks like a heatsink, but with very few fins, and the inlet and outlet pipes for the coolant. These early attempts had problems with the connectors that leaked.

I don’t know what they have planned this time round, but I would expect them to use a refrigerant much like a domestic refrigerator. I feel that the connector problems have most likely been solved by now… but only time will tell.

[DataCenterStaff]

I was at an expo last month where they have a liquid cooled server setup running at full capacity and it was still hot, but not as hot as the other example they had running air cooled. I wish I remembered the company name..

[raid]

More excellent work from ASHRAE “2011 Thermal Guidelines for Liquid Cooled Data Processing Environments” (Free White Paper)

http://tc99.ashraetcs.org/documents/...Whitepaper.pdf