A four-rack installation of the Green Revolution liquid coolings solution, which submerges servers in a coolant similar to mineral oil.
High-density cooling specialist
Green Revolution Cooling has published photos and video of several installations of its product, which submerges servers in a liquid similar to mineral oil. The Austin, Texas startup said its cooling enclosures can eliminate the need for CRAC units and chillers, allowing users to cool high-density servers at a fraction of the cost of traditional racks.
Green Revolution’s CarnotJet Submersion Cooling System resembles a rack tipped over on its back, filled with 250 gallons of dielectric fluid, with servers inserted vertically into slots in the enclosure. Fluid temperature is maintained by a pump with a heat exchanger, which can be connected to a standard commercial evaporative cooling tower. The company says its solutions will work with OEM servers with slight modifications (removing unneeded fans, applying a coating to hard drives).
Liquid cooling is used primarily in high-performance computing (HPC) and other applications requiring high density deployments that are difficult to manage with air cooling. Interest in liquid cooling has been on the rise as a growing number of applications and services are requiring high-density configurations.
Green Revolution’s first unit was installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, home to the Ranger supercomputer. This video features a four rack (100 kW) installation at
Midas Networks [1], an ISP in Austin:
Green Revolution says its enclosures represent a 50 percent savings in overall energy costs for the workloads at Midas Networks. The company says the payback on the initial investment in the liquid cooling system ranges from one to three years.
Mineral oil has been used in immersion cooling because it is not hazardous, transfers heat almost as well as water but doesn’t conduct an electric charge.
Green Revolution [2] is among a number of companies introducing liquid cooling solutions that immerse servers in fluid. An immersion system with a different design was introduced by UK firm
Iceotope [3] at the SC09 event, while Hardcore Computing introduced its
Liquid Blade [4] immersion cooling unit last year.
A
photo gallery [5] on the Green Revolution web site shows other early installations, in which the enclosures sit atop a containment system to serve as a backstop against leaks.
“The containment here is a 3 inch metal wall, made of angle iron, surrounding the tanks and pumping module and sealed to the concrete slab below,” said Mark Tlapak of Green Revolution. “The area holds significantly more than one rack. In between the tanks we place expanded metal catwalk that sits 3 inches high to allow people to walk around the racks even if the containment area contains coolant. Each tank has two coolant level detection sensors that tie into the control software and send out instant alerts in the event of a change in coolant level.”
Here’s another look at the Midas Networks installation:
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com
URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/12/green-revolutions-immersion-cooling-in-action/
URLs in this post:
[1] Midas Networks: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/08/25/colocation-company-will-submerge-servers/
[2] Green Revolution: http://www.grcooling.com/
[3] Iceotope: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/11/17/iceotope-a-new-take-on-liquid-cooling/
[4] Liquid Blade: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/05/05/liquid-blade-submerged-blade-servers/
[5] photo gallery: http://www.grcooling.com/?page_id=655
[6] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
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