Friday 23 March 2012

Budget 2012 - Iceotope States Environmental Sustainability and Fiscal Responsibility can be mutually


Yesterday’s budget announcement saw George Osborne highlight the UK’s commitment to renewable energy, and announce that the Government will consider replacing the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC). However, the Chancellor failed to demonstrate the ‘clear commitment’ to the green economy that many suggested he would.
Peter Hopton, CTO of Iceotope, has made the following comments on the budget announcement, and what this will mean for the future of green IT.

“Yesterday’s budget needed to address the interests of both businesses and the green community, by stimulating economic growth, and encouraging a resource efficient economy. However, instead of this, the announcement confirmed the Government’s beliefs that the needs of businesses and the environment are incompatible, highlighting that support for future innovation in the green sector comes secondary to cost benefits. Osborne’s stated the Government intends to simplify the CRC, or indeed replace the scheme with an alternative environmental tax, but he failed to state what such a proposal would accomplish in a broader sense. We desperately need systems that are both fair to operators, and internationally competitive, but also those that encourage and incentivise energy and carbon efficiency.”

“In the Chancellor’s speech, there was little on future incentives for businesses to adopt green policies, or focus on their environmental impacts at all. The Government needs to recognise that green initiatives and innovation can lead to financial savings, and helping to set standards to reduce energy consumption can not only help improve environmental credentials, but can also help significantly cut costs.”

datacentre.me

23 March 2012

Friday 16 March 2012

It's cooler to soak your servers

What's going on in networking, operating systems, servers, storage and data centres?
Soaking your servers to keep them cool is not a new concept. Cray was doing it way back in the 1980s with the Cray-2. Wikipedia tells us that its use of liquid cooling led to the Cray-2 being given the nickname Bubbles, and to gags including "No Fishing" signs, cardboard depictions of the Loch Ness Monster rising out of the heat exchanger tank, plastic fish inside the exchanger.


I suspect that Iceotope, which has spent eight years developing a new form of immersive liquid cooling for servers, won't give rise to such levity. We're much more serious about this stuff now. Ahem.

Iceotope's CTO and founder Peter Hopton recently took me through the system which he claimed can save half of your datacentre energy costs.

The company sells cabinets of modules containing Supermicro server motherboards and all the parts that constitute a server, apart from spinning hard disks. "In the module are hot-swap, leakless water connectors that go into water backplane," Hopton said. "You never see water."

Each module is a server is encased in a leak-proof box filled with 3M's Novec 7300. On heating, this inert liquid expands 10 times more than water and so generates convection currents that carry the heat away, aided by a chimney effect created by the internal shape of the box. It convects very fast – up to 6 cm/sec according to Hopton -- and is less viscous with a lower surface tension than water, which enables it to reach the parts that water might not.

The module has a large bore water channel within a second compartment which forms a heat transfer plate. It plugs into a backplane which connects it to a closed-loop water system that includes a pair of redundant heat exchangers. Hopton said that the heat transfer plate inside the module was designed using principles of CFD to maximise convection. Water passed through the heat exchangers’ building sides can then exhaust heat into the outside world.

The advantages of Iceotope's system are that liquid is obviously much more efficient at heat dispersal than air -- water is about 3,000 times better, for example -- and that needs only a 72W pump to drive the water, which eliminates all the chilling equipment normally found in a datacentre. Additionally, the system cools all the server's components, not just the CPU and chipset.

Of course the downside is getting over the idea of filling your datacentre with liquid, to which point Hopton said:

"If it leaks, all the water will sit at the bottom of the cabinet in a tray as there's not much of it. You already have water in the datacentre in the CRAC and the humidifiers, so all we have done is brought the water a bit closer to the servers."


For Hopton, this system changes the economics of the datacentre: "There's no dust or air filtration, no chillers, no special rooms, and it's noiseless, you could put it in a library. Since our servers are protected from the atmosphere they should be more reliable, with no thermal stresses. In future, server complexes could be dirty with a concrete floor, since they're all sealed units."

Iceotope's biggest hurdle is of course the incumbents. It would be a big bet to shift to a new server design from a single, unknown vendor, let alone redesign your datacentre so radically.

Hopton is conscious of this: "Our long term goal is to build a licensing model in which other people make server units and we work with them, but we have to stimulate the market first and demonstrate there is a market for them before IBM etc will take note.

"So that's what we're doing. We will start being a customer of a board maker and build servers but then we will want global cabinet and server makers selling them through their own channels. We want to encourage diversity."

Ultimately, the cash will speak. Hopton claims that datacentre energy running costs could be cut by 50 percent, and that Iceotope servers can be much more tightly packed, as they don't need fans or space for air to circulate.

And to prove that it works, he cites a Swiss bank which has installed Iceotope servers.

"In future, you will buy a server from someone else and we are talking to server makers," Hopton said. "Right now we want to get into the commodity server market, and we can do that at a reasonable price point."



16 March 2012

Thursday 8 March 2012

Iceotopes innovative solution tackles the energy costs and environmental footprint associated with data centre...

Iceotope, the producer of the first truly scalable data centre ready integrated cooling and compute solution, is launching at CeBIT. This innovative approach to tackling energy costs and environmental footprints, combines industry standard ICT with next generation liquid cooling to deliver 24/7 free cooling for ICT, anywhere on the planet. This results in saving 97% of the energy cost of cooling and more than 75% of the mechanical costs. With Iceotopes unique liquid cooling system, all electronics are encapsulated in a sealed unit containing 3Ms Novec as the inert coolant. This reduces the power consumed at a server level by eliminating the need for any fans. Novec rapidly convects the heat away from the electronics, and then transfers it to a sealed low pressure gravity fed sub system. The heat can then be passively cooled or repurposed to centrally heat or provide hot water to other buildings, facilities or office spaces. No chillers, no CRAC, no waste.

Commenting on Novecs suitability for use in Iceotope servers, Adrian Hyner, sales manager at 3M said, Novecs safe, sustainable chemistry provides an excellent balance between performance, safety and the environment. By using an inert chemical coolant as opposed to potentially flammable solutions as used in alternative liquid cooling platforms, data centre owners can improve safety while making a dramatic overall reduction in electricity costs.

Jon Summers, senior lecturer and researcher, institute of thermofluids, at Leeds University, has been instrumental in the research into Iceotopes new system. "It is time that efforts were focused on the efficiency of internal cooling of information systems in data centres, said Summers. Using air is an easy engineering option, but certainly not efficient. Therefore the use liquid encapsulation of the electronics in the Iceotope system offers an elegant engineering solution with a definite efficiency gain." Researchers predict that the worlds data centres will consume 19% more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year, said Peter Hopton, founder and CTO of Iceotope. In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking to technology that will help to not only reduce environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centre and HPC environments. Through our research with Leeds University and 3M, were excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location, and were looking forward to demonstrating the new product at this years CeBIT.




08 March 2012

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Liquid Cooling It All Comes Flooding Back

A couple of years back, we heard that servers would be going to liquid cooling,. The idea seems to be resurfacing, says Peter Judge On March 7, 2012.

When launching its new Xeon E5 range of processors this week, Intel made a lot of how efficient they are, saying that they cut the energy demands of servers by as much as 50 percent.

The server makers in the room all had plenty of tweaks and tips to cut energy use at the system level, including fans which are individually controlled. Cooling at full blast, a fan can use 75W, but can be cut down to 1W stand by if they are not needed.

Why not stop blowing air?

But what are those fans doing there? As 451 Research memorably described it, running a data centre and cooling it by air is like having a room full of electric heaters cooled by a battery of electric fans.

Air is not great for cooling. It takes energy to move it around and it is so thin, that it can't carry away much heat. A dense liquid will absorb heat better, and can carry it away through convection currents with a minimum of pumping.

High end computers used to be water cooled but, though water cooling is still used in the doors of certain server cabinets, it is rarely seen today. Despite this, brave gurus are predicting that liquid cooling will eventually be the norm.

As well as reducing the energy demands of a data centre, it also has potential benefits, in that heat in liquid form can be re-used more easily. Most systems now don't use water as a coolant (it's not great close to electronic systems), but it is easy to run the actual coolant through a heat exchanger, and have a good supply of hot water, for heating or other needs.

In 2009, IBM told us to expect all servers to be cooled by liquid within ten years. We are not sure how seriously to expect that, but Big Blue is certainly putting water cooled servers in very public contracts - for instance in the data processing for last year's Wimbledon tennis tournament.

Bring on the cool startups But the idea of bringing liquid cooling into mainstream machines in racks seemed to have gone quiet last year. If it is to happen, it will most likely be the preserve of a startup - and given the extent of the paradigm shift they are attempting, it will have to be a very patient startup. At the moment, we are aware of at least three such "cool"
startups.

In the US, Hardcore Computing has backing from Sun founder Scott McNeally, and has been working away at this idea since around 2006.

Green Revolution Cooling has a very simply engineered solution, which places normal blades vertically into a sealed container so they are simply submerged in a large tank of coolant. It recently extended the idea, by showing how the waste heat can be used to heat buildings.

The UK's contender, Iceotope, was launched in 2009. We've not heard much since then, but the company has just re-emerged under a changed management structure, at this year's CeBIT show in Hanover. Iceotope's idea is to make the liquid-cooled blades fit into convential racks, but each one is made into sealed container. The coolant
(3M's dielectric coolant Novec) is circulated in each blade individually, through nozzles at the back.
The plus side is that an Iceotope server room is much like a conventional one, with an extra coolant circulation system going up the back of each rack, alongside power and network cables. The downside is that this is at this stage very much a proprietary system, albeit built with very standard electronic components, and built to be as easily serviceable as possible.

Iceotope claims to be able to reduce cooling costs by 95 percent, as well as providing a potential asset in the heat output. Whether this benefit is enough to persuade data centres to adopt a new system (from any of these new cool kids) remains to be seen.




Liquid-cooled cabinets

UK-based liquid cooling specialist Iceotope has launched what it describes as ‘free cooling for ICT, anywhere’ at the Cebit trade event in Hanover, Germany. The company’s unique system encapsulates all electronics in a sealed unit containing 3M’s Novec as the inert chemical coolant. Heat is transferred away from the electronics to a sealed low pressure gravity fed sub system where it can be passively cooled or repurposed to centrally heat or provide hot water to other buildings or facilities.

Eliminating the need for fans, the power consumed at server level is reduced, addressing both the energy costs and environmental footprint of data centres and HPC facilities. Iceotope reports that this approach can save 97 per cent of the energy cost of cooling and more than 75 per cent of the mechanical costs of such facilities.

Iceotope liquid-cooled cabinets have a list price of £19,995 ($31,500), which includes hot swap redundant pump/heat exchangers and six Iceotope module centres ready to house a total of 48 modules. Fully-configured server modules with two of Intel’s six-core Xeon Romley E5 processors, 64GB RAM, 40Gb Infiniband and high endurance SSD Storage start from a list price of £3,995 ($6,300).




07 March 2012

UK data centre vendor Iceotope suspends server chips in liquid cooling solution

Even the most efficient air-cooled data centres waste 20 percent of their power running fans inside the servers, according to British liquid-cooling specialist Iceotope, which launched its water-cooled servers at the Cebit trade show.

The first modules compatible with Iceotope's cooling system each contain two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors. A rack can hold 48 of them, the company said. The modules are loaded from the front and back of the rack, which does not need the hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement common in air-cooled data centres.

While some server manufacturers take a half-hearted approach to liquid cooling, pumping fluid through the heatsinks on top of key components such as processors, Iceotope goes all-in, immersing half-size SSI (Server System Infrastructure) motherboards in Novec, an inert cooling fluid developed by 3M, and sealing them inside
special modules. The cooling fluid carries the heat away from the motherboard through convection before giving it up to a heat exchanger through which water is pumped at low pressure, according to Iceotope CTO Peter Hopton.

Iceotope can cool an entire 20kW rack with a pump consuming just 70W, whereas some air-cooled servers contain fans rated at 200W or more per shelf, Hopton said. The Iceotope system warms the water by just 5 degrees Celsius, and can operate with incoming water temperatures of up to 45C, which means year-round free-air cooling is possible almost anywhere on the planet, he said.

A cabinet will cost just under 20,000, including two heat exchangers, two water pumps, two power supply units and all the necessary chassis. The first processor modules, each containing two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors, 64Gbytes of RAM and SSD storage, start at 3,995. The boards in the first modules come from Supermicro, and Iceotope will sell the modules through some of Supermicro's channel partners, Hopton
said.

Iceotope prices its modules at 20 percent above equivalent air-cooled equipment. "We like that number because it's known that lifetime power costs are greater than capital equipment costs, and we save 20 you percent of the cooling cost," he said.

While Iceotope's servers aren't the cheapest around, Vik Malyala of Supermicro sees a market for them among the cost-conscious. "This is for people trying to bring the overall cost of operating a data centre down," he said.

Hopton hinted that data centre cooling could even become a profit centre rather than a cost centre: The waste heat in the cooling water could be reclaimed, using a heat pump to concentrate it for use in istrict heating systems in offices or housing near the data centre.




07 March 2012

UK data centre vendor Iceotope suspends server chips in liquid

by Peter Sayer

Even the most efficient air-cooled data centres waste 20 percent of their power running fans inside the servers, according to British liquid-cooling specialist Iceotope, which launched its water-cooled servers at the Cebit trade show.

The first modules compatible with Iceotope's cooling system each contain two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors. A rack can hold 48 of them, the company said. The modules are loaded from the front and back of the rack, which does not need the hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement common in air-cooled data centres.

While some server manufacturers take a half-hearted approach to liquid cooling, pumping fluid through the heatsinks on top of key components such as processors, Iceotope goes all-in, immersing half-size SSI (Server System Infrastructure) motherboards in Novec, an inert cooling fluid developed by 3M, and sealing them inside special modules. The cooling fluid carries the heat away from the motherboard through convection before giving it up to a heat exchanger through which water is pumped at low pressure, according to Iceotope CTO Peter Hopton.

Iceotope can cool an entire 20kW rack with a pump consuming just 70W, whereas some air-cooled servers contain fans rated at 200W or more per shelf, Hopton said. The Iceotope system warms the water by just 5 degrees Celsius, and can operate with incoming water temperatures of up to 45C, which means year-round free-air cooling is possible almost anywhere on the planet, he said.

A cabinet will cost just under £20,000, including two heat exchangers, two water pumps, two power supply units and all the necessary chassis. The first processor modules, each containing two of Intel's new six-core Romley E5-2600 processors, 64Gbytes of RAM and SSD storage, start at £3,995 The boards in the first modules come from Supermicro, and Iceotope will sell the modules through some of Supermicro's channel partners, Hopton said.

Iceotope prices its modules at 20 percent above equivalent air-cooled equipment. "We like that number because it's known that lifetime power costs are greater than capital equipment costs, and we save 20 you percent of the cooling cost," he said.

While Iceotope's servers aren't the cheapest around, Vik Malyala of Supermicro sees a market for them among the cost-conscious. "This is for people trying to bring the overall cost of operating a data centre down," he said.

Hopton hinted that data centre cooling could even become a profit centre rather than a cost centre: The waste heat in the cooling water could be reclaimed, using a heat pump to concentrate it for use in district heating systems in offices or housing near the data centre.


07 March 2012

VIDEO: Iceotope Liquid Cooled Cabinets



Iceotope takes an innovative approach to tackling energy costs and environmental footprints by combining industry standard ICT with next generation liquid cooling to deliver 24/7 free cooling for ICT, anywhere on the planet. This results in saving 97% of the energy cost of cooling and more than 75% of the mechanical costs.

With Iceotope’s unique liquid cooling system, all electronics are encapsulated in a sealed unit containing 3M’s Novec as the inert coolant. This reduces the power consumed at a server level by eliminating the need for any fans. Novec rapidly convects the heat away from the electronics, and then transfers it to a sealed low pressure gravity fed sub system. The heat can then be passively cooled or repurposed to centrally heat or provide hot water to other buildings, facilities or office spaces. No chillers, no CRAC, no waste.

Commenting on Novec’s suitability for use in Iceotope servers, Adrian Hyner, sales manager at 3M said: “Novec’s safe, sustainable chemistry provides an excellent balance between performance, safety and the environment.” By using an inert chemical coolant as opposed to potentially flammable solutions as used in alternative liquid cooling platforms, data centre owners can improve safety while making a dramatic overall reduction in electricity costs.

Jon Summers, senior lecturer and researcher, institute of thermofluids, at Leeds University, has been instrumental in the research into Iceotope’s new system. “It is time that efforts were focused on the efficiency of internal cooling of information systems in data centres,” said Summers. “Using air is an easy engineering option, but certainly not efficient. Therefore the use liquid encapsulation of the electronics in the Iceotope system offers an elegant engineering solution with a definite efficiency gain.”

“Researchers predict that the world’s data centres will consume 19% more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year,” said Peter Hopton, founder and CTO of Iceotope. “In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking to technology that will help to not only reduce environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centre and HPC environments. Through our research with Leeds University and 3M, we’re excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location, and we’re looking forward to demonstrating the new product at this year’s CeBIT.”




07 March 2012

Tuesday 6 March 2012

ICEOTOPE’S LAUNCH MARKS NEW GENERATION IN LIQUID COOLING FOR SERVERS


Iceotopes innovative solution tackles the energy costs and environmental footprint associated with data centre cooling

 Iceotope, the producer of the first truly scalable Data Centre ready integrated cooling and compute solution, is today launching at CeBIT.  This innovative approach to tackling energy costs and environmental footprints combines industry standard ICT, with next generation liquid cooling, to deliver 24/7 free cooling for ICT, anywhere on the planet.  This results in saving 97% of the energy cost of cooling and more than 75% of the mechanical costs.

 
With Iceotope’s unique liquid cooling system, all electronics are encapsulated in a sealed unit containing 3M’s Novec as the inert coolant. This reduces the power consumed at a server level by eliminating the need for any fans.  Novec rapidly convects the heat away from the electronics, and then transfers it to a sealed low pressure gravity fed sub system.  The heat can then be passively cooled or repurposed to centrally heat or provide hot water to other buildings, facilities or office spaces. No chillers, no CRAC, no Waste.


Commenting on Novec’s suitability for use in Iceotope servers, Adrian Hyner, sales manager at 3M said, “Novec’s safe, sustainable chemistry provides an excellent balance between performance, safety and the environment.”  By using an inert chemical coolant as opposed to potentially flammable solutions as used in alternative liquid cooling platforms, data centre owners can improve safety while making a dramatic overall reduction in electricity costs.

 
Jon Summers, senior lecturer and researcher, institute of thermofluids, at Leeds University, has been instrumental in the research into Iceotope’s new system.  "It is time that efforts were focused on the efficiency of internal cooling of information systems in data centres,” said Summers.  “Using air is an easy engineering option, but certainly not efficient. Therefore the use liquid encapsulation of the electronics in the Iceotope system offers an elegant engineering solution with a definite efficiency gain."


 “Researchers predict that the world’s data centres will consume 19% more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year,” said Peter Hopton, founder and CTO of Iceotope.  “In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking to technology that will help to not only reduce environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centre and HPC environments.  Through our research with Leeds University and 3M, we’re excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location and we’re looking forward to demonstrating the new product at this year’s CeBIT.” 
 

3M’s Mark Nursall and Leeds University’s Jon Summers are both presenting with Iceotope at CeBIT to demonstrate and discuss the benefits of this unique modular liquid cooling system.  Iceotope will be demonstrating its new technology at stand A47 in hall 11 at CeBIT 2012, Hannover, Germany, March 6-10.


Press contacts
Mike Marquiss / Fiona Halkerston
Johnson King
+44 207 401 7968


 
Pricing

Iceotope liquid cooled cabinets have a list price of £19,995 ($31,500), which includes hot swap redundant pump/heat exchangers and 6 Iceotope module centres ready to house a total of 48 modules.  Customers need only add suitable PDUs to match their infrastructure, plus modules, power supplies or the optional cable management system.

Server modules start from a list price of £3,995 ($6,300), for a fully configured server with Two 6 Core Xeon 'Romley' E5 Processors, 64GB RAM, 40Gb Infiniband and high endurance SSD Storage. Various other specifications are available including custom configurations and high-end processors.

 
About Iceotope

Iceotope Ltd, registered in Guernsey has been established to develop and deliver 'full time free cooling for ICT anywhere'.  This is done by combining next generation liquid cooling technology, industry standard ICT and Iceotope’s own I.P.  Designed with environmental impact in mind, this is the first truly sustainable and resource efficient solution to ICT cooling. Iceotope’s energy efficient technology is designed, engineered and manufactured in Great Britain.  
 
Iceotope at CeBIT
The DataChain
06 March 2012

Iceotope's launch marks new generation in liquid cooling for servers

Iceotope’s innovative solution tackles the energy costs and environmental footprint associated with data centre cooling

Iceotope, the producer of the first truly scalable data centre ready integrated cooling and compute solution, is today launching at CeBIT. This innovative approach to tackling energy costs and environmental footprints, combines industry standard ICT with next generation liquid cooling to deliver 24/7 free cooling for ICT, anywhere on the planet. This results in saving 97% of the energy cost of cooling and more than 75% of the mechanical costs.

With Iceotope’s unique liquid cooling system, all electronics are encapsulated in a sealed unit containing 3M’s Novec as the inert coolant. This reduces the power consumed at a server level by eliminating the need for any fans. Novec rapidly convects the heat away from the electronics, and then transfers it to a sealed low pressure gravity fed sub system. The heat can then be passively cooled or repurposed to centrally heat or provide hot water to other buildings, facilities or office spaces. No chillers, no CRAC, no waste.

Commenting on Novec’s suitability for use in Iceotope servers, Adrian Hyner, sales manager at 3M said, “Novec’s safe, sustainable chemistry provides an excellent balance between performance, safety and the environment.”

By using an inert chemical coolant as opposed to potentially flammable solutions as used in alternative liquid cooling platforms, data centre owners can improve safety while making a dramatic overall reduction in electricity costs.

Jon Summers, senior lecturer and researcher, institute of thermofluids, at Leeds University, has been instrumental in the research into Iceotope’s new system. "It is time that efforts were focused on the efficiency of internal cooling of information systems in data centres,” said Summers. “Using air is an easy engineering option, but certainly not efficient. Therefore the use liquid encapsulation of the electronics in the Iceotope system offers an elegant engineering solution with a definite efficiency gain."

“Researchers predict that the world’s data centres will consume 19% more energy in the next 12 months than they have in the past year,” said Peter Hopton, founder and CTO of Iceotope. “In order to try to combat this increase in power consumption, we need to start looking to technology that will help to not only reduce environmental footprint, but also help reduce the costs associated with power and cooling in data centre and HPC environments. Through our research with Leeds University and 3M, we’re excited about the impact our solution will have on data centre design and location, and we’re looking forward to demonstrating the new product at this year’s CeBIT.”

3M’s Mark Nursall and Leeds University’s Jon Summers are both presenting with Iceotope at CeBIT to demonstrate and discuss the benefits of this unique modular liquid cooling system. Iceotope will be demonstrating its new technology at stand A47 in hall 11 at CeBIT 2012, Hannover, Germany, March 6-10.

Topics: Energy Efficiency; Power & Cooling;




06 March 2012

Iceotope touts super liquid cooling for data centres

Iceotope today announced a new technique of cooling servers, which it claims can make fans redundant and cooling costs non-existent.

The launch happened at this year’s CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, with the company also saying the solution cuts 75 per cent of the mechanical costs associated with cooling servers.

Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean

The product uses 3M’s Novec liquid as a coolant, which Peter Hopton, founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Iceotope, called the “environmentally friendly little brother” of Fluoroinert – 3M’s previous coolant incarnation.

A water jacket containing Novec wraps around components and travels through the servers in fast currents at a rate of centimetres per second. With its low surface tension, the coolant “gets into all the cracks” to absorb the heat from servers and take it away to heat exchanges, where the liquid can either be cooled or used to heat other buildings and water within the complex.

The technology can not be incorporated into existing servers, however, and businesses would have to buy new servers – or modules as Iceotope refers to them – to install the technology.

Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean.

Customers can buy cabinets, featuring six server modules – which look like blades – as well as the pump and heat exchanges, for £19,995. However, the cabinets can house up to 48 modules, which start at £3,995 for fully configured servers containing two six core Xeon E5 processors, 64GB RAM, 40Gb Infiniband and SSD storage.

Users are able to choose between AMD and Intel processors.

Hopton told IT Pro the technology could soon roll-out across the data centre, with products for switches, routers and GPUs in the pipeline. He defended the upfront prices though, saying the overall benefits would save a lot more money in the long term.

“No chiller equipment is needed so when you are kitting out a new data centre, you don’t need to buy it,” he said.

“It is not massively expensive and if you need new servers… it is cost effective when you start to look at the money saved on energy consumption.”

Although he couldn’t confirm any UK customers yet, Hopton did say it was being implemented within UK data centres and the test company would be revealed soon.
 



06 March 2012

Iceotope liquid cools cabinets and servers with 3M's Novec

Says new solutions offer a safer way to liquid cool components and brings savings to the data center

Iceotope liquid cooled platform modules

UK company Iceotope, that patented liquid cooling for servers in the data center back in 2009, has released new products to market that use 3M’s Novec, an engineered non-flammable solvent it says makes the cooling process safer.

Liquid cooling of IT equipment has been around for some time and Iceotope first announced its modular liquid cooling invention in 2009.

3M’s Novec is used in a number of heat transfer applications. The environmentally friendly inert chemical coolant is currently used in fire sprinklers for environments containing expensive equipment such as museums, hospitals and banks as it becomes a gas immediately after discharge.

Iceotope said that in the data center, Novec can rapidly convect heat away from electronics, transferring it to a sealed low-pressure gravity fed tube system to provide 24/7 free cooling for ICT at any place and any time.

It can then be repurposed to provide central heating or district heading for other facilities.
“Our system is ‘hot swap’, clean and dry, using our unique Iceotope valve technology,” Iceotope said on its website.

Overall, it claims the solution can reduce cooling costs by 97% and compute power load by 20% by removing the need for air handling and refrigeration, with no chillers or CRAC units required.

Iceotope has worked closely with Leeds University on the technology. Late last year its founder and CTO Peter Hopton, who invented the technology, bought the company with a consortium backed by a seven figure investment sum.

Leeds University senior lecturer and researcher for the institute of thermofluids Jon Summers said liquid cooling can provider more efficiency than air-cooled infrastructure.
“Using air is an easy engineering option, but certainly not efficient,” Summers said.

“The use of liquid encapsulation of the electronics in the Iceotope system offers an elegant engineering solution with a definite efficiency gain.”

Icetope offers a range of solutions using Intel, AMD and other vendors.

Its high-density, 2N cabinets have a list price of £19,995 (US$31,500) which includes hot swap redundant pump/heat exchangers and six Iceotope module centers for housing 48 modules.

The server modules start at a price of £3,995 (US$6,300) for a fully configured server with Two 6 Core Xion Romley E5 Processors, 64GB RAM and 40Gb Infiniband and high endurance SSD storage.

DatacenterDynamic's FOCUS magazine will contain a special Insert on Cooling in edition 21, out in May.

 

06 March 2012