See What the Future has in Store — Watch Our Video

GRC is proud to partner with Intel^® and other trusted industry-leaders to address these challenges. Watch the video below and you’ll hear from Mohan J. Kumar, Intel’s Data Platform Group Fellow, and GRC’s CEO Peter Poulin. They’ll discuss how, working together, the two technology innovators are striving to perfect the entire immersion cooling ecosystem in terms of fluid compatibility, native server design, energy usage, and more.

Organizations across the globe are starting to pay attention to the financial, environmental, and ancillary benefits of immersion cooling technology. Adoption of immersion cooling (IC) is being driven by multiple factors, among these are significant financial benefits and the capability of processing big data at the edge. This has caught the attention of several leading OEMs that are looking to expand upon the utilization capabilities for their respective products within their client’s environment. And they are working feverishly to meet the anticipated market demand for the immersion-ready hardware.

After the adoption of this technology, the next logical step in the lifecycle becomes apparent —which is the maintenance of the technology, from IC infrastructure, to immersed products, to ensuring uptime.

It is highly likely that the first time anyone with even a rudimentary background in IT sees immersed systems there may be an experience of wonderment. I personally had that experience when I attended my first meeting at Green Revolution Cooling in Austin, Texas. Being an IT professional with more than twenty-five years of experience and even with the continual advancement of technology over that time, it is rare that I am stopped in my tracks. This is not as simple as a new software version or faster processing chip. This is on par with seeing an air-breathing organism live in an undersea environment without the need for a breathing apparatus. This is as radically innovative and creative as any blockbuster that Hollywood could possibly fathom. The greatest challenge in that statement is — getting stopped in your tracks and pausing to reflect, does nothing for down time and the need to get a disabled unit back up and running. Truth be told, virtually every technician that is dispatched to fulfill a hardware support ticket who arrives at an immersion rack will be confused about the equipment being contained within a liquid environment and that could exasperate the issue at hand.

Avaso is a unique services company and we have established a long-standing and trusted partnership with GRC as a global services partner. Our technicians are very familiar with the technology we have installed. We actively support preventative maintenance solutions, and are ready to provide emergency dispatch support for every GRC product that is deployed globally. Our team of direct badged technicians and engineers in more that 190 countries support all makes and models of IT infrastructure today, so adoption and familiarity of immersion cooled products is a natural fit. As our team is familiar with the technology, our familiarity as being a third-party services organization translates to the ability of supporting virtually any product that is immersed within the racks, pods, and tanks.

Avaso supports the break/fix requirements for immersed products and does so with a committed response requirement. This may not be the case with most other third-party maintenance providers.

• As GRC’s global partner for installation, maintenance, conversion, and ancillary support solutions, our global team of more than 1,800 technicians spread across 190+ countries are already familiar with immersion cooling technology and applications.
• We work with several OEMs to support expanded warranty and post warranty solutions for clients that are looking to support their immersed infrastructure.
• We are able to meet challenging response requirements to ensure that equipment continues to process data with minimal impact from downtime.
• Avaso’s global field dispatch and global depot network can meet the requirements of hardware maintenance that is deployed within an immersed state.
• Avaso can convert legacy hardware to function in an immersed state, pushing off the need to capitalize a significant hardware investment as part of the shift to adoption.

The potential advantages of leveraging GRC’s suite of products are clear. The financial and environmental impacts of incorporating immersion cooling technology within your infrastructure plan can shorten the timeline to realize your organizational objectives to be Carbon Neutral by a pre-determined date. GRC went so far as to find a partner who could not only support their immersion cooled product suite but enable their clients to leverage a support ecosystem that can convert existing IT servers and switches and support new hardware purchases in the future, as well.

Paul Brundage is an experienced sales executive with more than twenty-five (25) years of experience in building business partnerships on behalf of IT support organizations and considers the GRC/Avaso partnership as one of the most innovative over his career

Years ago, certain technology services were nothing but a fantasy, except thanks to the continuous technical innovations, it became reality. There is no doubt the non-stop technological evolution has changed our lives to a degree that technology has become indispensable in most if not all areas of life. ICT growth in the Middle East also has its share of the aforementioned leap. We are experiencing a massive pro-technology movement that is being translated to major developments in information technology specially in prominent countries in the region such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has achieved a great success in the information technology sector development and using modern technologies in various fields. It is also working hard and according to deliberate steps to move to digital transformation in order to achieve the goals of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030.

A large number of the MEGA Saudi projects that the Kingdom has recently launched rely on modern technology and information technology in the first place, and it is still working to employ all new technologies and techniques to serve these projects in an optimal way.

The Kingdom seeks to be among the top 100 cities in the world, by upgrading 5 existing cities with smart infrastructure. While as mentioned earlier building mega smart cities where modern technologies play an effective role such as:

It should be noted that Saudi Arabia has a large number of Internet users, as 100% of the population has access to the 2nd and 3rd generation network, while 88% of the population has access to the 4th generation network and Saudi Arabia is ranked 5th in 5G & IOT integration through more than 6,000 cellular towers spread around the kingdom.

Another promising economy in the region is Egypt with its strategic location that helped in making it a significant transit hub for submarine cables and connected to 10 out of 18 cables that pass through its Suez Canal. Albeit the political uncertainty and macro-economic instability wrought by the 2011 revolution the ICT sector has remained remarkably resilient.

The ICT industry is expected to play a central role in driving growth for Egypt’s economy in the coming years. To achieve this, the government has mapped out a plan for development with a number of key aims, which include improving the quality and accessibility of mobile, internet and government services offered to citizens; utilizing ICT infrastructure to improve government efficiency, with a special focus on health, education and tourism; and facilitating the creation of a large and diverse export-focused industry. The government is hoping to capitalize on the country’s competitive advantages and place ICT at the center of its economic development strategy. To this end, the MCIT is working on the ICT 2020 & 2030 Strategies. The framework for the plan focuses on seven main pillars including basic infrastructure, digital content, electronics design and manufacturing, ICT industry programs and initiatives, and legislative and policy frameworks. The government has allocated a budget of $17bn for all these developments. This included $600m for cloud computing, $6.1bn for broadband, and $450m for electronics design and manufacturing. As a consequence of this investments, the government managed to increase ICT GDP by 65%, increasing it to $14.75bn by 2020, up from $8.9bn in 2014-15.

This can be seen in Egypt’s remarkable efforts in fostering the digital innovation by integrating AI to the digital system that helped Egypt move from the 111th to the 56th rank in the government AI readiness index in 2020 and plans for building Mega smart-cities like The New Administrative Capital.

There appears then to be an acceleration in the growth of the ICT sector in Turkey which to be noted is a major Middle Eastern economy with a GDP of more than $720bn in which the ICT sector represents around 3% where it’s valued at $27bn, and a staggering 69 Techno-parks (with an additional 15 underway) and more than 1,100 R&D centers scattered around the country which helps make important contributions to innovation ecosystem and technology development. Also, ICT exports represent an important indicator in the sector in Turkey after the success of almost doubling its exports in a 3 years period (since 2014 to 2017) from $655mm to over $1.1bn while broadening its export markets with the European market considered as the top client getting hold of more than 82% of the Turkish ICT exports.

Also, ICT growth in the Middle East is burgeoning in countries like Qatar and the UAE, which are moving towards knowledge-based economies and making investments in state-of-the-art ICT infrastructure, skills development and e-government. These efforts will enable them to be positioned as one of the leading dynamic and fast-growing economies in the region.

The ICT revolution won’t even be possible without the proper infrastructure both virtual and physical, and the pillar of the physical infrastructure is data centers. A data center is a physical facility where data can be stored and processed and plays a very important role in the future data economy as the world moves increasingly to the web, users and businesses demand quick information. The closer a business is to a data center, the higher the performance of the service. Reliability is the success criteria for data centers, and redundancy assures data center reliability but unfortunately that redundancy comes with a price. Design and cooling have their fair share from the hassle of operating a data center and specially in the Middle East due to the scarcity of white space and hot climate, and different cooling technologies have been tested and used for keeping data centers capable of cooling the hugely increasing demand in computing power but again this comes with colossal costs.

Amongst the emerging technologies that is being used currently in the region is immersion cooling. Advancements of AI/ML, IoT integration has raised demand on high density computing where immersion cooling does the magic, and GRC has been the key player in the immersion cooling market since 2008 with successful deployments worldwide, and with the new series 10 ICEraQ has set new benchmarks for immersion cooling technology. As for the Middle East we are seeing a major Telco operator experimenting with liquid immersion cooling and also an increase in demand of adopting the technology among other verticals of the market (e.g., defense, oil & gas, municipal and others).

In conclusion, the region has been witnessing a paradigm shift in all market verticals and the growth in ICT sector is seeming unstoppable with the blistering lifestyle humans are leading

Sustainability is the new buzz word in the industry. Corporations and hyper-scalers are demanding sustainable data centers because their customers demand a reduction in the carbon footprint of power-hungry data centers. Consequently, there has been a surge in demand for data centers in the Nordics where power is genuinely ’green’ sourced from hydro and wind turbines, not the renewable energy certificates data centers in other regions rely on.

Having worked in the Nordic region for over 10 years, I have watched this change from indifference for the carbon footprint and its associated power and cooling load to its current place high up the corporate agenda. The reasons in Europe are the fear of legislation from the European Union, the need to report carbon footprint in company accounts, and customer demand. The carbon footprint of data centers was first highlighted for the general public in the excellent Greenpeace report, Click Clean and Dirty Data. This is where we are, so how is it that immersion cooling benefits sustainability?

Put simply, it helps in two ways. By reducing the power demand of the data center and reusing the waste heat from the servers for other applications, immersion cooling has a huge impact.

Let’s begin with the power demand of the data center from the grid and its stand-by generators. This comprises IT load and mechanical load for the cooling/ventilation. Great strides have been made in reducing the cooling/mechanical load in the last few years. In the Nordics, the lower average ambient temperatures help provide ‘free cooling’ for much of the year. Fjords and lakes are sometimes used as a cooling source, but this is not possible in much of Europe and the rest of the world where ambient temperatures are much higher.

So how does immersion cooling help in this regard? The answer is quite simple. The internal fans are removed from the servers since they are not required in an immersion cooling solution. (They would act like little propellors.) Removing the fans reduces the IT energy load by 10-15%, a very significant figure. Essentially, 1000kW of compute can be performed with only 900kW of power — the immersion cooling system would only require a miniscule fraction of this 100kW savings to operate. This has huge implications on every aspect of the data center infrastructure. There is no additional cooling load, which normally ranges from 150kW to 600kW depending on the design and location. The electrical infrastructure is substantially reduced in terms of switchgear and cabling. The stand-by generators are also smaller due to the reduced load, so apart from the reduced power demand to the site there is also a reduced CapEx and OpEx.

The next aspect is the re-use of the server heat. This has become a huge issue in Europe with many cities, including Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Dublin demanding strategies for server heat re-use as part of the planning/permitting process. So how does immersion differ from air cooling in this regard?

Because it circulates around all of the components, the cooling fluid captures 100% of the server heat, as opposed to 30% in air-cooled solutions. Better still, the temperature of the coolant is around 45C, far more usable than the 20-30C of an air-cooled system. Depending on the site location, the waste server heat can be used in district heating, fish farming, or manufacturing processes like wood pellet manufacture as EcoDataCenter does in Sweden.

There is another aspect which wasn’t considered until recently. The carbon footprint of the construction of the data center itself and its disposal at ‘end of life’. This is now being considered in the calculations of the impact of the data center on the environment. Everything from the building components to the equipment installed, and then the disposal of that equipment at ‘end of life’. This is known as Scope 1, Scope2, and Scope 3. There is a range of equipment that is either not required or is reduced in size using immersion cooling. Consequently, the overall carbon footprint is less. In addition, the building is smaller so it requires fewer construction materials.

In conclusion, it is safe to say the immersion cooling benefits sustainability by significantly reducing the carbon footprint of the data center, probably between 15-30% depending on location and ability to re-use the waste heat. The way forward for a sustainable future then!

Total Data Centre Solutions is a GRC agent in Europe & the Nordics.

The prospect of overhauling any complex IT system is enough to give any I&O leader nightmares. But upgrading air-cooled data centers to immersion cooling solution is a lot simpler—and less stress-inducing—than most people imagine.

Find that hard to believe? Here’s a bit-by-bit breakdown to show you exactly what we mean.

Removing Heat from the Room

The coolant distribution unit (CDU) is the all-important hub of any immersion cooling system. It removes the heat from the coolant exiting the server racks through a coolant-to-water heat exchanger connected to a warm- or chilled-water loop.

In retrofitting your data center with an ICEraQ® immersion cooling system from GRC, you can easily connect the CDU to the air-handlers’ existing water and electrical lines.

Ambient Air Cooling

As advertised, an immersion cooling system will dissipate the vast majority of server heat. Each rack dissipates approximately 500W into the room because the fluid and rack are typically warmer than ambient air.

For this reason, we recommend keeping a room air conditioner around for technician comfort, counteracting heat from transformers, electrical panels, and the like.

Raised Floors

Essential for airflow on legacy cooling systems, raised floors are fast becoming ghosts of data centers past. While not required, you can retain them to keep all wires and piping under the flooring when switching over to a GRC immersion cooling solution. We also offer a below-floor CDU option for use with existing raised floors, allowing for further increased floor density.

Power Planning

Power planning typically constitutes a huge portion of any data center build or redesign. Fortunately, if you’re switching to immersion cooling, you can increase your power budget.

Once you’ve removed all your energy-sapping air-cooled equipment, and we’ve optimized your servers by removing their fans, you’ll be able to fit more servers in the same power envelope—without electrical upgrades.

Fire Suppression

Whether you’re building a new data center from the ground up, or updating the one you have, fire suppression is one of the many items on what can be a very long to-do list.

Remember, simplicity and flexibility are two hallmarks of immersion cooling systems. So, when you migrate to a GRC ICEraQ solution, you can keep the same fire suppression system you have now—and sleep soundly

Water Piping and Infrastructure

CDUs for GRC immersion cooling systems use an automated valve to adjust flow when needed for varying loads. When thinking about water piping and infrastructure, balancing valves may be required depending on what other loads are in your water branch.

You can use the piping from your air handlers for this purpose. Either keep your existing chilled-water system, or reroute to a warm-water loop for the greatest OpEx savings. Water-side free-cooling (without the use of compressors) can reduce operating costs significantly because water temperatures can be increased to 86-95°F (30-35°C).

Data Center Floor Layout

Legacy data center layouts can often be sprawling landscapes dictated by the inefficiencies of air cooling. Since airflow is no longer a factor with immersion cooling, physical access to the racks is the primary consideration when it comes to layout.

GRC ICEraQ systems are arranged end-to-end, making the space-wasting hot/cold aisle schemes of air cooling a thing of the past.

Immersion cooling also greatly simplifies capacity planning. There’s no need to purchase all of the cooling at once. Just plan the room for the future and fill out from one side.

Planning & Financing

Given rapid advancements in and increased reliance on IT, the capacity planning, budgeting, and financing associated with legacy air-cooling are normally fraught with complexities. Because it offers tremendous flexibility and scalability, plus lower CapEx, immersion cooling eases many of these complications.

Another plus: green data center solutions from GRC may also qualify for energy-efficiency government subsidies and tax rebates when upgrading air-cooled data centers. You should also explore taking advantage of hot water reuse revenue streams.

When it comes to accurately and reliably undertaking a data center capacity planning initiative, the challenge can be daunting. Do you recall how much planning, effort, and time went into your last attempt? You needed to forecast the necessary compute to meet your mid-term business needs, as well as project your long-term growth requirements, while trying to keep budgets in line. Skillfully and successfully doing all this is no simple task.

The Risk: Capacity Projections
Gone Wrong

Aligning today’s needs with tomorrow’s predicted growth is like hitting a moving target. Traditionally, you had to build with future capacity in mind and hope that your projections were correct. That decision also had a financial impact — forcing you to incur CAPEX today for demand that could be years away. When these five to ten-year projections don’t end up materializing, your data center ends up being either over- or under-provisioned.

The Bottom Line:

So, Move to the Cloud?

You could just move to the cloud, but in addition to properly migrating data, potential security, and compliance issues, moving to the cloud means you’re losing operational control and might not have desired access for support. Also, depending on terms of use, the cloud can be expensive (up to $500/kWh) and require long lease agreements (up to 15 years)*. This means you’ll be relying on your cloud services’ physical architecture to always remain ahead of latency issues and the tech curve.

Immersion Cooling: All the Rewards, None of the Risks

Instead of precarious data center demand forecasting or moving compute to the cloud, there is another alternative — single-phase liquid immersion cooling. This flexible, cost-effective technology makes planning and provisioning for compute a much simpler process, providing controlled growth, easy management, and proven reliability with less complexity (only 3 moving parts).

Benefits That Go Beyond Capacity Planning
and Hyper-Efficient Cooling

You can’t simply add hundreds of killowatts of IT capacity in a traditional air-based or liquid-augmented solution data center unless you’ve already provisioned, or are ready for a large capital outlay for the additional cooling and power for grey space infrastructure like CRACs, CRAHs, containment structures, or raised floors. With immersion cooling, you have the flexibility to retain control of your operation, revise projections, and adapt to changing business needs on an asneeded basis — quickly.

CAPEX:

OPEX:

Greater Server Reliability:

Even More Savings:

Flexible & Successful Data Center Capacity Planning is Within Your Reach

As you can see, immersion cooling relieves you of all the pain points associated with yesterday’s outmoded capacity planning by providing an alternate approach better suited for today’s world, It allows you to pragmatically expand your data center’s compute on an on-demand basis, alleviate large up-front budget constraints, and increase overall operational efficiency. We think that’s pretty cool.

Concerns about global warming and environmental sustainability have moved to the forefront of boardroom and conference room conversations around the world. It has certainly become a hot topic in air travel and data centers.

Interestingly, while there’s widespread green shaming of the airlines for being prime polluters, data centers are now approaching the carbon footprint of our high-flying counterparts.

Carbon Copies:
Airlines and Data Centers Are Twin Energy Hogs

Globally, airlines contribute around 2% of all anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon pollution.¹ Data centers are right up there with them, consuming about 3% of the global electric supply, and dumping hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.²

This trend is sure to accelerate. In fact, several models suggest that data center energy usage could easily consume up to 10% of the global electricity supply in the next decade. It would be one thing if all those electrons were generated from wind or solar farms. But in reality, over 60% of the world’s electricity is still produced using fossil fuels.³

Digital Demands Are Soaring

This increasing dependency on everyday digital tools is likely to bring unintended consequences, and a not-insignificant environmental impact. The burgeoning internet of things, artificial intelligence, streaming entertainment, edge deployments, the launch of 5G mobile networks, along with the advent of more powerful (and power-hungry) CPUs and GPUs, are all destined to drive data center electrical usage significantly higher.

What’s more, according to the global marketing intelligence firm IDC, 152,000 new devices will be connecting to the Internet every minute by 2025, bringing the total to 80 billion worldwide.⁴ That’s a lot of data flying and flowing through data centers.

Reasons for Optimism

Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope in the quest to reduce global carbon pollution.

Where the airlines are concerned, 2020 became a game-changer of the highest order. If there’s a glimmer of positivity about the COVID-19 outbreak it could be this: the world is starting to recognize that a lot of air travel is unnecessary; that through the use of technology we can still stay connected, and get much of our work done without the environmental impact of jetting all over the globe.

Data centers also have the time and means to get ahead of the carbon curve through two main modes of attack: power-generation and powerconsumption.

On the power generation side, for example, more than 20 of the largest Internet companies – including Facebook, Google and Apple – have committed to powering their digital infrastructure with 100% renewable electricity. As a result, over 10 gigawatts of renewable energy has already been deployed worldwide.⁵

Where power consumption is concerned, there are many things operators can do, and are doing, to green up their data centers. Installing more energyefficient UPSs, servers and PDUs (power distribution units) is a good start. However, since upwards of 40% of a data center’s energy consumption goes into cooling alone, this is a much more productive focus for improvement.⁶

Immersion Cooling Can Clear the Air

Most recently, key technologies have matured that significantly reduce the amount of energy required to deliver a unit of compute, make an artificial intelligence decision, safeguard your home from porch pirates, or stream a scene from Game of Thrones.

For example, an oil services enterprise has realized a 40% energy savings over air cooling by implementing immersion cooling in their data center.

This breakthrough technology has also been endorsed by IT giants like Intel® and the NSA, and is at work within some of the world’s largest cloud, enterprise, education, government, high-frequency trading (HFT), and telecom organizations

Data Centers Can Lead the
Environmental Sustainability Charge

As more renewable energy sources come online, and technologies like immersion cooling become more broadly adopted, I believe the data center industry will continue expanding its commitment to a more sustainable planet. Raising awareness and urgency of this issue will help sustain the progress that’s being made.

Legislation that mandates energy efficiency goals, much like carbon reduction measures enforced in other industries, could further accelerate data centers toward a carbon-neutral state. Encouragingly, following the 2015 Paris Agreement, in countries around the world 99% of territorial greenhouse gas emissions are now covered under pledges known as “intended nationally determined contributions” or INDCs.

Nevertheless, at the risk of being pessimistic, it’s sobering to realize that global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels hit a record high in 2019.

A pioneer of single-phase immersion cooling since 2009, GRC (Green Revolution Cooling) has been an environmental evangelist as you see it engrained in our name and has been at the forefront of data center sustainability since our founding.

As a company we are totally committed to raising awareness and creating a sense of urgency around the issue of decarbonization. We encourage you to take a stand on this issue as well as, help flatten the carbon footprint curve, and not allow data centers’ environmental impact to “soar” nearly to the heights of the airlines.

At the end of every great action movie, hero and nemesis face each other for a final battle to prove that good triumphs over evil. At least that’s what we hope. Well, while we think single-phase immersion cooling is more than pretty good, we hardly believe air cooling is evil. (‘Aggravatingly exhausted’ might be a better term.)

In this installment of our comparison blog series we’ll stack these two diametrically different systems beside one another to show just how far data center cooling has advanced over the decades.

Matchup:
How These Competing Cooling Technologies Work

Air Cooling

The word “legacy” is often used to indicate an old technology fast moving toward obsolescence. That fairly accurately describes air cooling. Particularly so when you consider how long it has been around (nearly half a century), together with the inexorable threats to its effectiveness it now faces, which we’ll discuss later.

In its simplest form, a legacy air-cooled data center brings outside air in through intakes on air handlers. This air is chilled by a computer room air conditioning (CRAC) unit before it is forced beneath a raised floor up into the “cold aisle” of the server racks. This cold air moves through and cools the servers, then exits in the “hot aisle,” where it is contained and vented through a plenum that returns it to the air handlers. Cold-water chillers and cooling towers can also be used.

Single-Phase Cooling

Single-phase immersion cooling works on the principle that liquid is a much better conductor of heat than air. Here, servers are installed vertically in horizontally-oriented coolant bath of dielectric (electrically non-conductive) fluid. Coolant transfers heat through direct contact with server components. Heated coolant then exits the top of the rack, and is circulated between the racks and a cooling distribution unit (CDU) connected to a warm-water loop. This loop incorporates a cooling tower or a dry cooler on the other side as the final form of heat removal. In the end, cooled liquid is returned to the rack from a heat exchanger.

Compare, Contrast and Be Cool

To help with your decision making we’ll now break down each of these technologies and see how they compare across four important categories.

Air Cooling

While air-cooled data centers have served the industry well for decades, they are arguably the most complex when compared to alternatives such as liquid-to-chip, rear-door heat exchangers (RDHx) and, especially, single-phase immersion cooling.

What might seem a simple server and rack-only system actually requires much more: some combination of raised floors, aisle containment strategies, chillers, air handlers, humidity controls, filtration systems and plenums. Furthermore, to support the above, air-cooled data centers must also operate a comparatively large ancillary infrastructure – notably backup generators, UPSs and batteries.

All this necessary complication equates to a relatively large capital expenditure (CAPEX).

Air Cooling

The plain fact is that air is a less effective conductor of heat than liquid – 1200X less effective. This not only makes air-cooled data centers intrinsically less efficient, but creates ripple effects that have a serious impact on operating expenses.

First off, fans account for 20% of server power consumption. To bolster air’s effectiveness, energy-sapping refrigeration components like chillers and air handlers are needed as well. Those in turn impact the size of power infrastructure.

Given all the above, basic air cooling requires the highest operating expenses of all major data center technologies while delivering a PUE of approximately 1.35 to 1.69.

Single-Phase Cooling

Again, with only three moving parts (GRC removes fans to optimize servers for immersion), zero refrigeration components, plus vastly reduced infrastructure requirements, single-phase immersion cooling delvers a 90% reduction in cooling energy and 50% cut in total data center energy usage over air cooling. As a result, operators can realize an immersion cooling PUE of <1.03.

By the way, the added infrastructure involved with air cooling not only increases costs from an electrical power perspective. That equipment can also come with expensive annual maintenance contracts. None of it is necessary with single-phase immersion cooling.

Plus, compared to two-phase systems, maintenance on GRC’s ICEraQ micro-modular, immersion cooling solutions is very easy. You just open the lid, lift out the server and set it on integrated service rails, which are placed at a convenient waist height. Problems solved.

Read Our USAF Case Study >>

Air Cooling

It’s true that some air-cooled data centers are capable of cooling upwards of 30-35 kW/rack. But, in reality, air-cooled data centers become very inefficient above 15 kW/rack.

Industry trends are making the situation worse. Electricity-hogging GPUs are moving in to tackle HPC applications like IoT and AI. As another example, Intel’s® new Skylake release consumes a whopping 250 W of energy. Place two of those on a 1U server, add upwards of 200 W for other electronics, multiply that by 40 servers and you have 28 kW for a CPU-based system. Add co-processors and accelerators and you’re way beyond the limits of air cooling.

To keep up with demands, data center operators may be inclined to create mixed-density racks. Where air cooling is concerned, this inevitably leads to hot spots, which can lead to hardware failure.

In particular, this evolution in hardware will create a real moment of reckoning for operators of air-cooled data centers at their next hardware refresh.

Single-Phase Cooling

GRC ICEraQ™ and ICEtank™ systems are ideally engineered to break through the heat barrier and take data center computing into its next evolution—and beyond. Either solution can easily cool up to 100 kW per rack—theoretically up to 200 kW when used with a chilled-water system.

Read our Density Dilemma
White Paper >>

Air Cooling

Any cooling technology that draws air from the outside is destined to create hardware reliability issues. Why? Because it exposes IT assets to potentially harmful airborne contaminants as well as the adverse effects of the air itself. By this we mean chiefly corrosion and oxidation.

That risk increases depending on the air quality and natural humidity levels of the unconditioned air itself. Clearly, locales with a high degree of humidity, air pollution or windblown particulates can wreak havoc on ill-equipped data centers. By the way, these concerns increase as the need for remote edge deployments increases.

Speaking of location flexibility, the inherent complexity and larger infrastructure requirements of air cooling present significant hurdles as to where computing power can be placed.

Finally, and as mentioned earlier, even with the best aisle arrangement approach, legacy air cooling creates hot spots which can lead to hardware failure.

Single-Phase Cooling

Three major factors give single-phase immersion cooling the highest possible marks in this category:

One, it is unquestionably the simplest practical form of cooling on the market. Thus, there are fewer things to go wrong: no chillers, air handlers, humidity controls, etc.; and no server fans to create vibrations that can (and do) increase MTBF (mean-time between failures).

Second, with immersion, critical IT assets are completely sealed off from the outside air, negating any environmental issues.

Finally, immersion cooling provides a more thermally consistent environment for the IT equipment, minimizing hot spots in the data center.

Considering the fact that air cooling is an outmoded legacy system in the truest sense of the word, single-phase immersion cooling wins this battle in the Data Center Cold Wars. And it can be your hero, too.

Things are really heating up out there. Even conventional computing operations are frequently pushing the 30 kW/rack barrier now. HPC apps like AI are becoming commonplace. And because IT is such an integral part of business growth, IT execs are under renewed pressure to have a fail-proof game plan for scaling up.

This fourth in our series of comparison blogs can help. By evaluating two popular data center cooling methods – single-phase immersion and rear door heat exchangers, we’ll give you insights on how best to “beat the heat” and master the trend.

Matchup:
How These Competing Cooling Technologies Work

Rear Door Heat Exchanger (RDHx)

Originally designed to make air-cooling more efficient, RDHx systems were an early solution for bringing the cooling effects of a liquid-to-gas phase change closer to the heat source. With RDHx, radiator-like doors are attached to the fronts or backs of server racks. Heat produced by IT equipment is removed by air blown into the exchangers via fans. That heated air travels a short distance before transferring to water or refrigerant running inside the radiators.

Heated liquid is then carried away from the server rack to a cooling distribution unit (CDU), which in turn is connected to an outside chilled water system.

Some RDHx systems have “active doors” with integrated fans, while others rely solely on server fans to eject the air.

Essentially, RDHx is just a better form of air-cooling. Although often mistakenly considered so, it is not a liquid-cooling solution.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

With single-phase immersion cooling, servers are installed vertically in coolant bath of dielectric (electrically non-conductive) fluid. Like its two-phase counterpart, the coolant transfers heat through direct contact with server components. Heated coolant then exits the top of the rack and is circulated through a CDU connected to a warm-water loop. This loop incorporates a cooling tower or dry cooler on the other side as the final form of heat removal. In the end, cooled liquid is returned to the rack from a heat exchanger.

Single-phase immersion cooling systems are noted for their simplicity, which translates into greater upfront affordability, easier operations and less maintenance.

Compare, Contrast and Be Cool

Now let’s break down each of these technologies and see how they compare across eight important categories.

RDHx

Again, because RDHx uses air – a bad conductor of heat, it requires a lot of air flow and a huge temperature delta between the incoming air and the heat source to maintain optimal core temperatures. The higher delta means that air must be cooled to temperatures that mandate the use of compressors or chiller plants to cool the air directly. Either way, when you consider the need for compressors plus the number of fans needed to create the required air flow, RDHx consumes significant amounts of energy

Plus, unlike immersion cooling, RDHx solutions still require server fans and do not reduce the server power consumption.

Given the combined electrical load of fans, chillers, CDUs and more,RDHx delivers a PUE of between 1.2 and 1.3.

It’s also important to note that, given tightening worldwide environmental regulations, many refrigerants are likely to get harder and costlier to acquire in the long run. This should definitely be considered when building a data center that requires compressor-based cooling.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

With single-phase immersion cooling systems, 100% of the heat is picked up by the coolant. In addition, the coolant’s comparatively higher density and superior thermal conductivity means that it can maintain optimal core temperatures with a much lower delta between the coolant and the heat source.. This eliminates the need for compressor-based cooling, and reduces the amount of mechanical work/electrical power needed to create flow and run chiller plants.

Add the disabling or removal of server fans and a 10-30% reduction of server power is possible.

Consider as well that single-phase immersion cooling does not require all the ancillary equipment (and corresponding energy draw) associated with RDHx. As a result, it delivers a remarkable PUE of about 1.03, despite the reduction in server power.

RDHx

RDHx systems can run either water or refrigerant. The former comes with major safety and reliability caveats to be discussed later. Although RDHx can be cost-competitive for 25-30 kW rack densities, there are limits to those benefits. In fact, its advantages drop sharply as densities rise beyond 15 kW per rack. Given the ever-increasing density of chips and hardware, operators may soon start to hit the 30 kW-per-rack wall with hardware refreshes.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

GRC ICEraQ and ICEtank systems can easily cool up to 100 kW per rack – theoretically up to 200 kW when used with a chilled water system. And while the financial case for GRC’s immersion cooling makes sense at rack densities as low as 10 kW (less in some cases), the higher capacity future-proofs the infrastructure against rising hardware density and the ever-evolving technology landscape.

Immersion cooling is also ideal for creating a diverse density layout. This allows operators to run high-density racks right next to lower density ones without stratification or the mixing of hot and cold air

RDHx

RDHx does not score well in this category, and here’s why:

Feeding the radiator-like doors of RDHx systems are fluid lines containing either water or refrigerant. Depending on which – and whether they’re routed above or below critical IT equipment, leaks can be a major problem. There have actually been cases when failures have sprayed conductive water onto servers and ruined them. So, clearly, using water is a concern.

Yet using refrigerant can be a problem, too, but for different reasons. Aside from high costs, RDHx refrigerants also have a global warming potential (GWP),putting them under the constant scrutiny of the EPA and EEA. In fact, some formulations are in the process of being banned, causing more than a few operators to be concerned about supply disruptions.

Two other factors impede RDHx’s reliability and location flexibility. One is the fact that these systems – much like any other air-cooling system – expose IT assets to airborne contaminants, moisture, and increased levels of vibrations. Thus, they require additional systems and equipment to protect them from harsher environments.

Next, RDHx still needs significant amounts of power and supporting infrastructure, which can limit location choices, especially for edge applications.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

In contrast to RDHx, single-phase immersion cooling scores an A+ when it comes to reliability and location flexibility. The reasons are simple. There are few moving parts (in other words, less things to go wrong). Also, servers are completely immersed, therefore shielded from any harmful environmental factors.

GRC ICEraQ and ICEtank™ systems are the epitome of simplicity, and can be placed virtually anywhere. In fact, our fully containerized ICEtanks can literally be deployed in a parking lot or loading dock.

Operators should also know that our ElectroSafe^® coolant is non-conductive, totally inert, and planet-friendly. Most likely it will not need replacing over a typical data center lifecycle.

Because air-based systems are fast becoming an outmoded “legacy” method for cooling data centers – and since RDHx is essentially an enhanced form of air-cooling, it simply cannot match single-phase immersion cooling in the eight critical performance categories discussed here.