While it is true that an individual horizontal rack has a slightly larger footprint than a vertical rack, when you look at the fully burdened data center footprint, immersion cooling produces significant space savings:

Simplicity is at the core of immersion cooling with ICEraQ. With just three moving parts, its system’s ultra-efficient operation, lower up-front cost and superior performance are all driven by its ability to do more with less.

Simply changing the medium of heat transfer from air to our proprietary ElectroSafe™ coolant, eliminates a lot of complexity from the data center. Chiller plants, air handlers, humidity controls and the like are replaced with just three simple moving parts: a coolant pump; a water pump; and a cooling tower/dry-cooler fan. This translates into a more reliable system with fewer headaches for operators and technicians. So simple in fact, the only periodic maintenance required on the entire system is a filter change typically needed only once a year.

What’s more, GRC’s Foresight Data Center Monitoring Software makes maximizing uptime easy. It provides regular diagnostics with early fault detection and enables remote monitoring plus email alerts.

And since liquid-immersion-cooled servers use less power, they also allow you to significantly downsize backup generators, UPSs, batteries and more, which further reduces infrastructure costs. Overall, it’s like moving from an internal combustion engine to astate-of-the-art electric vehicle. All the little complex moving parts are replaced with fewer, more efficient components.

GRC liquid-immersion-cooling systems are designed to be installed on raised floors and concrete slabs alike. And while it may seem obvious, it is important to point out that when talking about floor loading, pressure on the floor is a more important consideration than gross weight alone. Because our racks are horizontal, they help evenly spread weight across their footprint, yielding a floor loading that is often less than that of an air-cooled rack.

Actually, liquid-immersion cooling eliminates the need for raised floors entirely. However, if you already have a raised-floor infrastructure, there’s no need to remove it, reinforce it, or modify it in any way. ICEraQ immersion-cooling systems can be installed on virtually any solid floor.

It’s important to realize that single-phase immersion cooling is a completely different approach than two-phase.

First, our proprietary ElectroSafe™ single-phase coolant is actually very affordable—a fraction of the cost of two-phase alternatives. ElectroSafe is also non-evaporative and doesn’t need to be replaced over the life of a data center. Plus, it requires virtually no maintenance.

Second, the coolant cost is built into the lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of GRC immersion-cooling systems. It’s not an additional expense.

Last, from a larger cost perspective, GRC ICEraQ immersion-cooling solutions have been proven to slash overall data center build costs 50%—coolant included. They reduce cooling energy and maintenance expenses by half as well.

Our solutions have been battle-tested and proven to work. Perfected over the course of a decade, our liquid-immersion cooling systems have been installed by some of the world’s biggest operators in a breadth of industries. The list includes three of the top 10 telecoms, top supercomputing facilities, one of the web’s largest search engines, and government agencies, such as the DoD, Air Force and NSA.

First deployed in 2010, GRC’s ICEraQ™ micro-modular racked-based liquid cooling system is now used in cutting-edge data centers around the world, racking up millions of hours of reliable run-time.

Nothing could be further from the truth. GRC’s ICEraQ and ICEtank™ systems support rack-based servers from all major OEMs – Dell, Supermicro, HP, Cisco and many others. These servers only require fan removal before submersion.

If you’re considering a “white box” approach by building your own servers – or if you want to maximize space, power and budget, our systems also easily accommodate servers designed for immersion (SDI). These servers can include premium components from brands like NVIDIA®, Supermicro and others.

Learn More About Servers for Immersion Cooling

Yes, liquid-immersion cooling solutions like those offered by GRC can cool over 100 kW/rack, making them ideal for high-density applications. But immersion cooling is actually one of the best ways to solve an array of troublesome (but all too common) data center challenges. It’s truly multi-talented.

If you’re out of power, or trying to overcome the steepening costs of power, this highly energy-efficient technology enables you to cut cooling energy by up to 95%. So you’ll get more compute from your power envelope. Out of space? With its higher rack densities, liquid-immersion cooling enables you to put more computing power into your existing data center footprint. Or, since it requires none of the infrastructure traditional data centers do – raised floors, chillers, etc., it allows you to easily occupy spaces within your building that otherwise couldn’t be used as a data center.

GRC also offers a modular “data center in a box” solution. These empower you to easily and quickly deploy data center capacity virtually anywhere – in a parking lot, for example, or in harsh environments where other systems could never operate.

And liquid-immersion cooling is also a great choice if you need to expand but are trying to avoid high capital expenditures. Our customers report significant CAPEX savings at rack densities as low as 15kW.

Liquid-Immersion Cooling Capacity: 100+ kW/rack

Our ICEraQ micro-modular system and ICEtank modular liquid-cooled “data centers in a box” have helped many customers build out data centers for up to 50% less than traditional alternatives.

Estimate Your Savings with Our TCO Calculator

What’s more, these installations continue delivering significant cost savings on energy and maintenance. They also provide a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and serve as an excellent long-term return on investment.

There’s also some confusion between single – and two-phase immersion cooling, the latter of which is more complicated, hence more expensive. FYI, GRC helped pioneer the simpler (and less costly) single-phase immersion cooling approach for data centers.

GRC systems use a clear, odorless, non-toxic coolant called ElectroSafe™. ElectroSafe is a high-performance synthetic blend with 1,200x the heat retention capacity of air by volume. It offers exceptional, low-cost cooling for data center servers.

The coolant does not evaporate, readily ignite, is not reactive with water, and is also very stable, even when exposed to flame.

Read More About ElectroSafe Coolant