Blog
May 6, 2016
Immersion Cooling Leveraging Social Responsible Data Centers
Welcome to the wave of the “socially responsible” data center, or not. The bottom line from the NGO Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) paper is that nearly half of the data centers do not define energy efficiency objectives. They don’t even have an energy efficiency plan in place.
One of the references analysed is the survey conducted by Digital Realty Trust in January 2013 which concluded that only 20% of the 300 North American data center companies with revenues of at least $1 billion and/or more than 5,000 employees have a PUE below 2.0, with the average at 2.9.
The main recommended actions coming from this paper to the medium-large data center are basically the following:
March 27, 2016
Catalan president Puigdemont visits Submer and BitNap Datacenter
We’re thrilled to announce that just prior to publicly unveiling the new Submer Datacenter Cooling Solution, we received the president of Catalunya, Carles Puigdemont, during his visit at the BitNap Datacenter and Submer’s headquarters.
Its very encouraging to see leaders interested in green technologies such us our immersion cooling solution for datacenters.
The Submer team took the oportunity to stress the importance that public administrations must continue to focus on pushing the implimentation of cleener energy sources and technologies to drive our society. Submer is commited to being a game-changer in slashing CO2 emissions at the data center, which account for more than 2% of the global CO2 emissions. We think the public sector must set the example by continuously incentivating all business sectors.
Be a game-changer and take you data center to the next level with Submer.
March 5, 2016
Will Data Centers implement Immersion Cooling?
Since the 1960’s, supercomputers have been cooled with liquid. Some extreme density supercomputers such as the Cray-2 (released in 1985) and Cray T90 (released in 1995) used large liquid-to-chilled liquid heat exchangers and single or two-phase immersion cooling oils for heat removal.
Most of the supercomputer manufacturers have used, use or are trying to use immersion cooling. But what’s holding back on getting Immersion Cooling into the data center to cool commodity hardware? In our opinion, cost and comfort.
February 8, 2016
Microsoft testing undersea immersion cooling
Could the future of the data center be under the sea? Microsoft sure seems to think so! Project Natick is a research project run by Microsoft to evaluate the possibilities of cooling servers under water and in the future, even generating power to run those servers thanks to waves, tides or sea wind turbines.
Not much has been disclosed about Project Natick, but here are some facts:
February 3, 2016
Introducing the best open-bath Immersion Cooling solution ever built
Final sign-off from our engineers has finally moved the Submer “Phase 1” Pod from an idea in our minds to something tangible. Manufacturing is heavily underway with the full intent of keeping our Feb-March timeline for the Pod deployment at the BitNAP data center.
The Submer Immersion Cooling Prototype is a full-size fully functional system. Its designed to heavily test and demo that everything we’ve thought of and designed is actually feasible. It will also allow us to show the technology to potential early-adopters.
January 19, 2016
Not so obvious benefits of immersion cooling in your data center
Giving your servers a bath in an immersion cooling environment has some immediate benefits that we’d like to expose in this short article. There’s some obvious ones that we’ve mentioned many times like making your data center greener and slashing operation costs, but today we’re going to talk about some not so obvious benefits:
- Silent Operation: this one is straight-forward. All fans on the servers are usually removed before placing them into their dielectric bath. Of course even if they had fans, by placing them in a fluid we’re immediately silencing them. It might not sound as a great benefit, but for those of us that’ve worked for hours in a row with servers inside a server room, we’ve felt the pain. Its very impressive to walk into a immersion cooling data center room with hundreds or thousands of kW’s of IT hardware submerged and not hear a thing. The dual pump system is just as silent, so you won’t be hearing them either.
January 14, 2016
Submer Immersion Cooling “Phase1” Pod under construction
The Submer immersion cooling Pod design for “Phase 1” is closed and its under construction! A very important milestone in the project to get the prototype installed in the BitNAP data center and start proving that Immersion Cooling is the data center cooling solution of the future.
As mentioned in previous posts, the Submer Pod structure has been fully designed from the bottom-up by our engineers and is being built by a Barcelona-based rack manufacturing company.
January 7, 2016
Submer immersion cooling “Phase 1” prototype moving ahead
As we quickly progress in closing the Submer immersion cooling prototype design and components with our engineers, we’ve also pinned down the exact location for the full-size functional prototype (codename “Phase 1“) inside the BitNAP data center.
As mentioned in one of our previous posts, BitNAP has kindly provided us with a closed-off space inside one of their large server rooms. The location is perfect as its going to allow us to:
January 2, 2016
Data center liquid immersion cooling with adiabatic cooling towers
What is Adiabatic Cooling?
Adiabatic cooling is the process of reducing heat through a change in air pressure caused by volume expansion. In nature, adiabatic cooling is often associated with elevation. As seen with cloud formations, an air mass that is heated expands and becomes less dense. Being less dense, it is lighter and rises above a higher-pressure air mass. Having reached areas with less dense air, it further expands, losing energy that was gained, and cooling as it does so. When the cooling air crosses the dew point, moisture in the air accumulates as clouds. With enough moisture and cooling comes precipitation. The principles of adiabatic cooling are also applied to increase humidity in facilities.
What are Adiabatic Cooling Towers and why are they used in Data Centers?
December 28, 2015
Open bath immersion cooling
Open bath immersion cooling is a data center cooling technique that implies fully submerging servers in dielectric coolant fluid. Its called open bath because servers are placed side-by-side in large tanks that assimilate bath tubs. These baths operate at atmospheric pressure and allow the coolant fluid to be pumped through the hardware components or servers submerged in it. At Submer we like to use the term “open bath” when talking about single-phase immersion cooling and “semi-open or closed” baths when talking about two phase immersion cooling.