PORTLAND, OR — At the Supercomputing 2009 conferencing this week, Iceotope unveiled a new technology to allow servers to be cooled by immersion in water, a new design that the company estimates could cut energy used to cool data centers by as much as 93 percent.
The technology can help owners and operators of air-cooled data centers to significantly save on cooling costs from CRAC units and chillers. Iceotope's technology uses the outside air to chill the water, which circulates to all the connected servers.
Another benefit of the liquid-cooled server technology is that it can reduce the space needed to store servers: The liquid-cooled servers can be very closely packed together without creating energy intensive hot-spots in the data center. By bringing servers closer together, Iceotope expects that the data center's footprint could be cut by 84 percent -- or IT managers can pack more computing power in the same space, if sufficient power is available.
Iceotope calls the technology an "end-to-end liquid" approach to cooling, bringing a synthetic coolant directly to individual servers, immersing the entire compartment called a cooling module. The cooling modules are designed to fit in a standard data center rack, making adoption of the technology simpler.
"We have spent 18 months developing this technology in stealth mode, with input from a number of interested customers," said Dan Chester, CEO of Iceotope. "We are delighted with the results we are able to achieve and are looking forward to demonstrating the system at the Supercomputing event. We believe that we will see a huge growth in the use of liquid-cooled servers as people see the ease with which these systems can be deployed."