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What is immersion cooling?
Immersion cooling is a highly efficient cooling solution that involves submerging servers in a non-conductive fluid. This fluid absorbs the heat generated by the servers, allowing for highly efficient cooling. Immersion cooling can significantly reduce energy consumption and operating costs, while also improving cooling capacity and IT reliability.
Immersion Cooling is a unique natural convection-based technology achieved by the circulation of a di-electric liquid. The single-phased system completely immerses IT equipment in hydrocarbon fluid, ensuring all heat generated by the equipment is captured in the liquid. This fully integrated solution includes immersed application centric server platforms optimized for synergy and performance.
This ground-breaking cooling system for data center is the ultimate solution to the growing demand for sustainable high-density and energy efficient data centers. The first of this cooling system for data center is in Hong Kong, the new solution significantly reduces data center energy consumption and provides more reliable performance. It marks a groundbreaking shift for a heavy energy-consuming industry towards a greener future by adopting innovative, sustainable technologies and practices. By transitioning to Immersion Cooling, data centers will be future ready while managing costs and the impact on our environment. The industry will then enter what would otherwise be impossible — a new era of data centers.
Why is immersion cooling important for data centers?
The energy consumption of a data center is a significant resource that should not be overlooked. IT equipment consumes most of the energy resources, with the power consumption through the servers being dissipated as heat.
In recent years, advances in AI, IoT and machine learning, combined with increased computing power and performance requirements, have led to a higher server rack density – a particularly dire problem with Hong Kong’s land constraints. The result has been an upsurge in heat generated by traditional data centers, with cooling systems for data center correspondingly consuming significantly more energy at greater cost.
By contrast, immersion cooling solutions are widely recognized as a cooling system for data centers for their reliability and energy and cost efficiency. They are also conveniently scalable to any size of data center.
Immersion cooling – also known as direct liquid cooling – is an innovative cooling solution that brings significant advantages over traditional air-cooling techniques, especially when applied to high-density environments such as data centers. For facilities that feature extremely high-density racks (typically over 30 kW), air cooling simply is not sufficient to maintain the reliability of IT systems, no matter how new or optimized they may be. For such facilities (rack power requirements are approaching close to 20 kW in many facilities, and many organizations are looking to deploy racks with requirements of 50kW or more), liquid cooling is not a choice, but a necessity.
With immersion cooling, the rack is designed specifically so that servers are inserted vertically. An immersion tank houses the servers in a dielectric bath, and utilizing a CDU, circulates cooling fluid to remove heat.
How does Newtech's immersion cooling solution work?
At Newtech, we offer a cutting-edge immersion cooling solution that is designed to provide highly efficient and reliable cooling for data centers of all sizes. Our immersion cooling solution uses a non-conductive fluid to absorb the heat generated by servers. The fluid is then circulated through a heat exchanger, where the heat is transferred to a cooling system.
Newtech’s expertise in end-to-end solutions for digital infrastructure means that the new immersion cooling solution will offer the long-term benefits of enabling sustainable, future-ready data centers anywhere, and will help to build a more resilient digital infrastructure.
As well as scalability, immersion cooling systems for data center also offer a quieter working environment. Other key benefits include:
Improved reliability and performance
Up to 10x increase in computing density when comparing to air-cooled data centers. It is also more reliable, as the server is now sealed in a unit and unaffected by vibration, humidity, or airborne dust particles.
Improved energy efficiency
Liquid has higher thermal transfer properties than air. It also reduces server energy use significantly as no fans are required within the rack – no water consumption and no fan energy used result in a 45% lower carbon footprint than that of air-cooled data centers, and a PUE of 1.09 or lower anywhere.
Sustainability
Liquid cooling provides a more effective way to repurpose captured heat, as liquid-to-liquid heat transfer is more efficient than what is possible with air-based cooling systems. As a result, a large portion of energy is ready for reuse, creating the possibility of energy neutrality by supplying heat.
Maximizing cost efficiency
It maximizes data center space by reducing its physical footprint by 40%. It also decreases cooling infrastructure CAPEX and OPEX by around 50% and 85% respectively.
Challenges for Immersion Cooling Adoption
The current challenge for immersion cooling adoption can be attributed to several factors, including:
Infrastructure Design
Immersion cooling requires a different infrastructure design compared to traditional air-cooled data centers. This means that retrofitting existing data centers to accommodate immersion cooling may not be feasible or may require significant modifications.
Customization
Immersion cooling solutions are often highly customized and tailored to specific hardware configurations. This means that integrating new hardware into an existing immersion cooling solution can be challenging.
Limited Availability
Immersion cooling technology is still relatively new, and there are a limited number of vendors that provide immersion cooling solutions. This can make it difficult for organizations to find the right solution for their needs.
Maintenance and Support
Immersion cooling solutions require specialized maintenance and support, which can be more complex than traditional air-cooled solutions.
