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.

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.

Cooling a data center never used to be this hard. But IT and data center professionals have watched the thermal design power (TDP) of chips rise almost 50% in the last decade, generating more heat and using more power than ever before. Rack density has grown. And hot GPUs are becoming the weapon of choice for tackling high-performance computing (HPC) requirements.

This third in our series of blogs compares the two most emergent technologies designed to cool data centers: cold plate and single-phase liquid immersion cooling. Hopefully, these insights will help you understand the technological differences and choose the best solution for your operation.

Matchup:
How These Competing Cooling Technologies Work

Cold Plate Cooling

Basically, “touch,” “direct-to-chip”, or “liquid-to-chip” cold plate cooling replaces older, inefficient air-cooled metal-finned heat sinks with liquid-cooled heat sinks. As the name suggests, it attaches a metal plate atop a CPU or GPU, which transfers heat through a heat-spreading material (such as thermal paste) from the chip to the plate. The plate retains the ability to absorb this heat because it is cooled with liquid, which is a much better conductor of heat than air.

The heated liquid circulates from the plate through a coolant distribution unit (CDU) to the facility water loop. This may be connected to a chiller, or even cooling towers, then directed back to the plate. Since cold plate only cools the CPUs (which typically account for 60-70% of the total heat load), air-cooling is used to cool the remaining 30-40% heat load. This makes cold plate technology a hybrid solution that involves both liquid and fan-blown air cooling.

Cold plate is probably the most popular (and one of the oldest) forms of liquid cooling in the world of electronics and IT. Although most recognize the improved performance and efficiency it offers over air-cooling, the cost, complexity and potential risks involved have prevented large-scale adoption of liquid cooling.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

Single-phase immersion cooling offers the performance and efficiency benefits of cold plate without the added costs, complexity and risks. With single-phase immersion cooling, servers are installed vertically in a coolant bath of dielectric 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.

Many installations that have switched to single-phase immersion cooling have been impressed with its 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.

This fundamental complexity not only impacts upfront infrastructure and hardware costs. It also limits hardware choices and makes server refreshes (typically in three-to five-year cycles) much more involved and costly as well.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

One of the hallmarks of single-phase liquid immersion cooling is that it is arguably the most fundamental form of modern data center cooling around – one that absorbs 100% of the heat load. This simplicity serves as the basis of immersion’s main value propositions of reduced upfront and operating costs.

How simple is it? Data center systems using GRC’s ICEraQ™ micro-modular immersion cooling solutions have only three moving parts: a coolant pump; a water pump; and a cooling tower or dry-cooler fan. Unlike cold-plate-cooled operations, there’s no airflow engineering. And, GRC data centers have no need for expensive infrastructure, such as chillers, air handlers and raised floors.

But here’s the number that really matters: single-phase liquid immersion cooling can reduce data center CAPEX up to 30% over cold plate cooling.

Cold Plate Cooling

As explained earlier, liquid-to-chip technology will get you (at most) three quarters of the way to a fully cooled data center. Because it needs expensive and inefficient air conditioning to take you the rest of the way, it is intrinsically less efficient than single-phase immersion cooling. Along with server fans, it also requires chillers, air handlers and other air conditioning equipment, which demand more electricity and regular maintenance, thus kicking up operating expenses.

Most modern cold plate systems deliver a PUE somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.15.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

Single-phase liquid immersion cooling couldn’t be more efficient. Literally 100% of the heat is picked up by the coolant. That means there’s zero residual heat requiring less efficient air-cooling.

Simple in design, with few moving parts, systems like GRC’s ICEraQ and ICEtank single-phase liquid immersion cooling systems are 80% more energy-efficient than cold plate methods, delivering a PUE (PUE) of 1.03.² That delta between cold plate and single-phase immersion pPUE is amplified by the 10-30% server power reduction immersion cooling enables through fan removal. The end result equates to a total data center energy cut of up to 35%.

Since immersion cooling eliminates the need for all air-cooling infrastructure and equipment – such as chillers, air handlers or humidity control systems, the annual maintenance cost associated with those is also eliminated.

Minimal consumables and vastly reduced electricity usage are what help single-phase immersion cooling deliver a 40% cut in OPEX for most data centers.

Cold Plate Cooling

Unlike the dielectric coolant used in single-phase immersion cooling, direct-to-chip or liquid-to-chip methods typically employ water or a water/glycol mix. These offer higher thermal conductivity than dielectric coolants, but are good conductors of electricity, nevertheless. Higher conductivity theoretically helps support higher heat flux. Yet this has little to no impact on the power density cold plate can support on a per-server or per-rack basis.

Since the electrically conductive coolant needs to be contained within heat sinks and plumbed individually to chips, it is at times physically impossible to fit and plumb multiple cold plates to every CPU and GPU within a high-density server.

Even though cold plate solutions are great for cooling isolated and localized hot spots, they don’t do so well with multiple heat-producing chips within confined spaces. Plus, given the fact that there are multiple heat-producing chips within each server – and multiple servers in a rack, cold plate solutions can get very complicated at scale.

Immersion cooling, on the other hand, uses a dielectric coolant that is a good conductor of heat but not electricity. Therefore, the coolant can directly contact all components within a whole rack of servers to capture 100% of the heat and cool each chip effectively.

For these reasons – and the fact that plates do not contact all heat-producing components, cold plate can only chew up some 70% of a typical data center’s server heat. Air-cooling has to do the rest. What’s more, cold plate typically maxes out at about 50 to 60 kW in rack density, making it unsuitable for many next-gen apps. Again, the real constraint here is two-fold: a limitation on how many custom heat sinks you can plug into what becomes very crowded boards; and the air cooling required for the remaining 30-40% of the heat load.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

Although GRC’s ElectroSafe™ coolant does not have the heat-carrying capacity of water, it is still 1,000X more efficient than air. With 300+ gallons of coolant in a rack, plus the managed flow and convection at work, this allows us to easily and effectively cool over 100 kW per rack without compressor-based cooling (with warm water). Theoretically, we can range up to 200 kW with a chilled-water system.

So, while it’s possible that cold plate could support higher heat flux, the metric has no practical application, as no existing or anticipated chips have come close to the limitations of immersion cooling. Imagine buying headphones that support a wider frequency range, but one that can’t be heard by human ears. Yes, the spec is true. Yet is it useful and/or worth the higher cost and complexity?

Read our white paper on tackling the data center density dilemma>>

Cold Plate Cooling

The complexity of cold plate solutions can present significant reliability issues. First, the sheer number of intricate parts and fittings creates numerous failure points. Furthermore, leaks can be catastrophic. Remember, we’re talking conductive water here: the enemy of electrical components.

Since server fans are still required, this introduces vibration and poses yet another point of failure. What’s more, IT assets are exposed to environmental assaults (e.g., moisture and airborne particulates), which can hasten deterioration and impact MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures).

As for location flexibility, two things work against cold plate when compared to immersion cooling. Cold plate is simply more complicated. It requires air conditioning infrastructure that is very energy-and cost-inefficient at a smaller scale. It magnifies capital, power and site constraints. Plus, the fact that components are exposed to air can make these systems a no-go for deployments in harsh environments.

Single-Phase Immersion Cooling

The cooling systems we’ve developed and perfected at GRC involve the total immersion of IT assets. This affords full protection from the heat, moisture, oxidation, and dust that can create real reliability problems. In addition, since no air flow is required, rooms or modular structures where the racks are enclosed can be completely sealed off if needed.

That’s how we give you the flexibility to locate your data center virtually anywhere on the planet, no matter how harsh the environment. Further, the 50% lower energy consumption and minimal site and space requirements allow you to maximize IT capacity within limited power and space envelopes.

Case in point: our ICEtank™ solutions sit inside an ISO container and are completely sealed off from the outside world. Not only can they be delivered in as little as 10 weeks, they can also go practically anywhere. Their simple, fully enclosed design makes them ideal for edge deployments.
CASE STUDY: See how our ICEtank solution helped the U.S. Air Force >>

We also offer a “plug-and-play” solution called the ICEraQ™ Micro – a 24U pre-configured rack that comes with an integrated CDU and pump. It lets you drop computing power in the most unlikely places with minimal site requirements. You just need power, water and a level floor.

Cold plate solutions have been around for some time. Although they can be a great spot-fix for isolated heating issues, their cost, complexity and risk have been obstacles to larger scale adoption. Single-phase immersion cooling not only overcomes all the limitations of cold plate. It delivers superior thermal performance and cooling of servers/components that wouldn’t be feasible with cold plate. And it features a modular form factor that is designed for scale and enterprise-grade data centers.

These factors together have made cold plate increasingly ineffective, and immersion an obvious solution for bringing data centers into the future. Conclusion: Single-Phase Immersion Cooling Finishes First

Real-world “edge” deployments can easily become a genuine hurdle when you consider speed of deployment, lack of existing infrastructure and the often sub-ideal conditions awaiting them at the construction site.

The goal of edge computing is to reduce latency by situating sufficient computing power as close to transactions as possible. The challenge is that some of those places are “off the grid,” so to speak, amid significantly suboptimal conditions and environments. For sure, things like extreme ambient heat, high humidity and airborne particulates cannot only unleash hell on IT assets. They can make edge computing an outright no-go.

Experience the Reality of
Immersion Cooling

To paraphrase one of my favorite movies, The Matrix, what if we told you there was a way to place easily expandable edge computing power practically anywhere on terra firma with the confidence you would be up and running in just 10 weeks? Moreover, with few if any worries about environmental issues.

What if all you needed to supply was water, electricity and an Internet connection and we could promise you as much as 800 kW of edge computing performance boxed up in one small, state-of-the-art package?¹

Flying High for the USAF

That’s essentially what our ICEtank™ containerized solutions provide. And we have a very high-visibility client who can verify it. Given its ongoing need to deploy remotely controlled computing power in faraway, often forbidding locales – with minimum personnel and support, the U.S. Air Force went full throttle when they heard about our modular, containerized ICEtanks.

Ultimately, our work has helped them achieve 100% HPC uptime for three years and counting with a 93.1% reduction in cooling power for a 1.037 PUE.

But what if you’ve completely run out of space indoors? Well, our ICEtanks are convenient “data centers in a box.” These 20 or 40-foot ISO containers come with four or eight preconfigured, 42U, immersion cooled racks, respectively, and can be placed anywhere outside. That includes harsh environments fraught with soaring temperatures and blowing sands or the relative tranquility of your parking lot. (Hint: the CEO’s spot is off limits.) All you need is water, electrical and networking.

For all their convenience, ICEraQ systems are hardly wimpy. Starting in 2009, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) enlisted GRC to help them build up computing power for what would ultimately yield one of the world’s fastest (and greenest) TOP500 supercomputers, Frontera. Our initial deployment involved an ICEraQ on their loading dock, and they effortlessly added racks over the years as their computing needs grew.

Blog Post: Super. Human. Computing — Immersion Cooled,
Frontera Supercomputer Helps Advance Science

Despite its attractions, some people have their head in the cloud when it comes to using that very same technology to overcome data center challenges. Yes, the cloud makes it easy to slough off scalability and maintenance concerns. Yes, it’s great for multilocation enterprises. But the cloud isn’t for everyone.

Security, shared time, downtime and other issues make the cloud unsuitable for some organizations. The U.S. military is one – and for good reason: increasingly, warfare is a data-driven undertaking. Distributed enterprises are another example of why the cloud is not a panacea, as many firms are reluctant o relinquish control of highly sensitive proprietary data and applications.

Hey, You, Stay Off of the Cloud

If you can’t go to the cloud, capacity planning becomes much more complicated as well. Lead time for IT development is often measured in years when design, approvals and build-out are taken into consideration. This generally necessitates “guessing the future,” making it easy to over-plan, which misappropriates budget. But longterm projections can also cause you to err on the other side and underplan. That can truly hobble an organization, as corporate fortunes are increasingly tied to IT. Despite these burdens, there’s intense pressure on infrastructure and operations pros to “get it right.”

raQ Up Serious Benefits

GRC’s liquid immersion cooling solutions take the calculus, luck, psychic powers and crystal ball out of the capacity planning process. Our systems make it easy to deploy capacity quickly, cost-effectively and incrementally in accordance with computing demands.

Have a spare room, basement or a loading dock? Any space – even without a data center infrastructure – will support our ICEraQs. And, our completely self-contained ICEtanks can be placed anywhere outside, even in the harshest environments. These efficient, low-cost units enabled the U.S. Air Force to drop compliant computing power right outside their Hill AFB data center in Utah and save money by tapping into existing power, Internet and water resources. Both can tie into any existing warm or chilled water system.

Video: ICEtank Immersion-Cooled Modular Data Center Overview

Four of Gillaspy’s points we consider to be particularly strong:

1. Hyper-growth and hyper-scaling epitomized by edge computing
2. Hyper-density to increase efficiency while cutting CAPEX, and OPEX
3. New workloads such as Big Data, AI/ML/DL, and IoT
4. New hardware, notably FPGAs, GPUs, and ASICS

A formidable list for sure. And yes, you also need to make sure you can deploy assets quickly, while tempering energy consumption.

Clear the Hurdles with All-in-One Immersion Cooling
Server Systems

The solution is having agile, energy-efficient infrastructure that doesn’t place limits on cooling, growth, and location flexibility. This is precisely why we’re working with Dell Technologies: to help data center operators quickly procure, deploy and scale best-in-class server/immersion cooling combinations virtually anywhere — including the edge – with All-in-One Immersion Cooling Server Systems.

Through the seamless integration of powerful Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with our ICEraQ™ and ICEtank™ modular immersion cooling systems, IT leaders can now easily purchase an all-in-one high-performance cooling server solution through either GRC or Dell Technologies OEM | Embedded & Edge Solutions group.

In doing so, they can join the likes of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense and the NSA, all of whom are currently using GRC ICEtanks and ICEraQs to achieve their IT objectives.

Single-phase immersion cooling is fast becoming the only viable solution for leaping over the hurdles Gillaspy and others have brought to light. Our systems immerse Dell EMC PowerEdge servers in racks filled with a non-conductive coolant called ElectroSafe™, which provides 1200X the heat capacity of air. Heat from the servers is easily absorbed by the coolant and quickly expelled from the rack. The result is a very energy-efficient system with a cooling capacity up to 200 kW/rack*.³

Notably, these systems have no need for raised floors, eliminate CRACs and CRAHs that add cost and complexity, which can severely limit location flexibility as well.

Fast-Forward Your Future

Learn What Makes Single-Phase
Immersion Cooling Superior.