The wet servers

David Hayward has a look at a new concept in server cooling and chats to the designers

Cooling a significantly sized server room is a challenge in itself. The energy requirements necessary to keep a constant air temperature are quite extraordinary, making the server room a less than green approach to providing adequate cooling. Then there are other aspects to take into consideration, such as humidity control systems, air purification, air conditioning servicing… The list goes on, and quite soon the server room itself has become the single most expensive part of any company’s IT equation.

However, the UK firm Iceotope has an ingenious solution. Led by Dr Jon Summers, from the University of Leeds’ School of Mechanical Engineering, a team of researchers have installed the first production system of servers completely immersed in liquid.

Traditional air cooling has a number of disadvantages when it comes to transferring heat away from a server. For starters it’s very expensive, it’s noisy, it requires more energy and it’s not particularly effective. Whereas liquid is several thousand times more effective at transferring heat, it’s quieter in doing so and requires significantly less energy.

The liquid in question is called 3M Novec, a non-flammable coolant that doesn’t conduct electricity. In fact, it’s so exceptional that Dr Jon Summers said, “The liquid we’re using is extraordinary stuff. You could throw your mobile phone in a tub of it and the phone would work perfectly.”

The server and the liquid cooled system uses a model based on computational fluid dynamics to represent the coolant as it flows through the server, making it an ultra efficient system, designed with a simple low energy pump installed at the bottom of the cabinet, pumping a secondary coolant, which is water, to the top, where it cascades down through all 48 modules of the server thanks to gravity. The secondary coolant then terminates at the heat exchangers within the cabinet for the transfer of heat to a third and final coolant, on an external loop, taking the heat away for external cooling or for reuse.

The high efficiency of this system means that the output water can reach temperatures of up to 50°C, which can then be used for heating rooms and providing hot water. Overall, the Iceotope-designed system uses a mere 80W of power to harvest the heat from up to 20kW of ICT use.

It’s extraordinarily impressive, and because there are no fans or air conditioning units, the server room is considerably quieter and uses an estimated 80 to 97% less energy to keep the equipment at perfect operating temperature.

Interview with Iceotope

We took a moment from Iceotope’s busy schedule to ask the team a few questions regarding this revolutionary liquid cooled system:

Can you tell us a bit more about the Iceotope company? When did it start? What are its objectives and goals?

Founded in 2011 with acquired IP dating back to 2005, Sheffield-based start-up Iceotope has designed and engineered an innovative liquid cooling system that solves some of the most pressing challenges facing today’s data centre operators. The technology has the potential to halve the energy usage of the data centre industry, prevent millions of tons of CO2 being released into the atmosphere and reduce the spiralling costs of running a data centre facility. Iceotope ultimately aims to offer 24/7 ‘free cooling’ anywhere in the world, including equatorial and desert regions.

Was all the R&D work conducted here in the UK, through and in conjunction with various universities?

Iceotope is the culmination of a five-year, UK-based R&D effort. The company has worked in partnership with various universities to include the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and most recently the University of Leeds. The current system is also backed by industry leaders such as 3M and AMD.

How easy would it be for a company to implement the Iceotope Liquid Cooling Server solution into its own organisation?

By negating the need for air handling, chilling and humidity control equipment at the server, rack or building level, the Iceotope Solution can be located almost anywhere with access to power and water, including industrial space or populated areas. By negating fans from the equation, the Iceotope Solution is completely silent in operation, meaning that servers can now be located in environments that were previously considered unsuitable for data centre use.

How do the setup costs of the Iceotope system compare with that of a traditional machine room, air con setup?

By removing the need for specialised data centre design, the Iceotope Solution slashes CAPEX and OPEX in equal measure. Traditional ‘air cooled’ data centre facilities require extensive and expensive infrastructure, sometimes resulting in 2/3 of the overall design. Such facilities also require much more physical space for ventilation (hot and cold aisles). The Iceotope Solution can be configured as a single supercomputer, multiple server racks or scaled out to create entire data centres, offering new builds and retrofits more building and more space for their money.

Would there be any advantage to implementing this system at the desktop level? For overclocking, perhaps?

Possibly, but our core market interest is not desktops at the moment. Overclocking aims to keep desktop computers running cool, whereas the Iceotope Solution aims to run server rooms neutral in terms of heat thus allowing for optimal processing power. We might look at designing a desktop product further down the line.

Which companies have so far used this technology?

The first production system was installed at the University of Leeds in January. We are in the process of installing a second system in Poland, buyer to be announced and bidding for a third requirement within the UK. We have a strong sales pipeline for 2013 and into 2014.

What happens if the systems fail? Is there a fan-based backup that kicks in?

There is no fan-based backup; the cooling systems are fault tolerant and fully redundant. They can also tolerate prolonged outages due to the thermal latency in the system.

Aside from reducing cooling costs by 97%, what other ‘green’ benefits are there to be had from this system? Are the materials used manufactured in a ‘green’ way, and can they themselves be recycled?

In addition to reducing cooling costs by 97%, the Iceotope Solution reduces ICT power load by 20% and overall ICT infrastructure costs by 50%. The technology can also help reduce associated CO2 emissions - something that the data centre industry is going to have to address soon, since it has been estimated to be on par with that of the airline industry in the years to come.

The Iceotope Solution also delivers high-grade heated exhaust water, which can be reused to heat buildings or for other applications - another very valuable ‘green’ benefit that is unique to Iceotope.

Our patented products are designed ‘cradle to cradle’ ensuring that all core components can be recovered and reused many times and all of our products are also designed, engineered and manufactured locally within the UK, and that’s something we are very proud of.

How do you see the future of data centre and server room cooling evolving? What projects do you have in line for future Iceotope systems?

We believe that most data centres will be liquid cooled in the future, the reason being that liquid is thousands of times more effective at transferring heat than air, and the cooling aspect of such facilities is the single largest contributor to inefficiency.

If you purchase a car today, the first thing you think about is running costs (fuel efficiency). Although the data centre industry is enjoying double digit growth year on year, it’s suffering from many pain points that liquid cooling can solve, such as running costs (cooling efficiency).

We’re finding in real customers that flexibility and adaptability are key buying motives, funded by energy savings. The fact that the Iceotope Solution does not even need a data centre environment, combined with the fact that it unifies servers and infrastructure into a single simple yet elegant solution makes the choice for many to switch from traditional air cooling to next-generation liquid cooling a simple and sensible one.

Conclusion

The world of server room cooling is on the verge of something very big. Wth the Iceotope system in effect, imagine the global implications to the carbon footprint. The future is certainly looking impressive, but there are still hurdles to overcome, chiefly the acceptance of a new innovative system.

However, those involved are confident that Iceotope’s system of cooling is the future; as Peter Hopton, Iceotope’s chief technology officer and originator of the Iceotope concept, said, “More than five years of research, innovation and collaboration have gone into Iceotope’s technology. The basic principle of the design has many applications and, while a few years away, there is no reason why every home shouldn’t make better use of the surplus heat from consumer electronics. Imagine having your PC or TV plumbed into the central heating system.”

In a world where the internet and cloud services will grow to unimaginable proportions and data centres become the equivalent of small towns in size, we as users have to take responsibility for the impact our daily lives have on the environment, and the Iceotope concept may very well be the saving grace and a positive outlook for a more green IT future. 

Key facts about data centres

• The world’s data centres use 31 gigawatts of power - more than seven times the capacity of the UK’s largest coal-fired power station, Drax in North Yorkshire.

• Data centre carbon emissions are projected to quadruple between 2008 and 2020.

• The UK has 7.6 million square metres of data centre floor space.

• One in three of the world’s population use data centres. The number is growing at around 15% annually.

http://www.micromart.co.uk/networking/servers/724/wet-servers