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John O | September 2012

Why Cool Your Data Center with Air When You Can Use Oil?


Sponsored by coolingZONE, LLC you one stop shop for all thermal management, heat transfer, and energy transfer information and connections, visit us at coolingZONE.com

We saw this first on EE Times then in a link on Reddit, total computer immersion in oil to cool servers in datacenters.   To the average sysadmin in a data center, total immersion is  a little unerving to say the least.  The fact that it is in oil is even more interesting.

The firm in question is Green Revolution Cooling, and what they offer is what they have termed their CarnotJetTM Systems:

The CarnotJet™ System is a fluid submersion cooling solution for data center servers. It is a complete end-to-end cooling system that uses non-conductive liquid coolant rather than air to achieve maximum cooling efficiency and performance. Compared to a standard air-conditioned rack system, the CarnotJet™ is capable of reducing cooling energy consumption of a typical data center by 90-95%, and reducing total data center energy consumption by half.

And what is the fluid used?

We use GreenDEF™ coolant, which is a clear, odorless, non-toxic, and low-cost formulation of dielectric (non-conductive) white mineral oil optimized for cooling servers and other data center hardware.

 

green-revolution-cooling_001_940


It is a pretty spectacular approach.  But has anyone else validated it?  Well yes.  It turns out Intel has, (read more at EE Times) and here is what they had to say about Green Revolutions approach:

“We asked a lot of tough questions and they had pretty good answers for all of them so we put a pilot together,” said Patterson. “There’s almost an emotional reaction [against oil immersion] at first, so people say they would never do that, but when they see the potential [energy] savings, they see there’s something there,” he said.


To be sure, others have considered this idea in various forms.   We did a quick review of patents at Google Scholar using the coolingZONE Google Scholar Search Tool and there are 181 articles on this topic!  And there is good reason: Cloud Computing is the wave of the future in computing, the "cloud" is not in the sky, its in Data Centers all over the earth.  But, as in all of physics, (thank you to Dr. Gaucher, my high school physics teacher) there is NO FREE LUNCH.  Those Data Centers need energy not just to power them so we can all use our tablets and laptops and smart phones but also to cool them.   Green Revolution claims their approach, messy as it might be in some instances, can reduce total energy consumption in a data center by an whopping 50%!   See more at this video from the Texas Advanced Computing Center on Green Revolution (click the video image to get to the video on YouTube):

green_revolution_video_cap_637


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