As with any innovative technology in the datacenter industry and beyond, immersion cooling is facing a string of barriers to adoption. These barriers include the complexity of cooling options, perceptions around operations, and tightening sustainability regulations. However, we caught up with Founder and CTO Daniel Pope to see how our innovative approach is breaking down these barriers for datacenters.
The Complexity of Cooling Options
With CPUs reaching 200 to 400W and GPUs moving towards 1000 to 1200W, air cooling is becoming increasingly inadequate.
In the saturated market of liquid cooling providers, choosing the right solution can be daunting. As standards within the liquid cooling industry are being defined through communities such as the Open Compute Project (OCP)2 and ASHRAE, it’s clear that the mass adoption of liquid cooling is imminent.
Removing the Barriers to Adoption: Evaluating TCO
When evaluating solutions for high-density computing, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) should be your primary concern. Immersion cooling stands out by offering the most competitive TCO across the board – from the chip level to data hall infrastructure. This approach not only maximizes performance but also ensures your infrastructure can outlast several IT generations.
Our proven technology runway, formed of a solid ecosystem, innovation, and interoperability, has also brought the Forced Convection Heat Sink (FCHS) package, which sets you on the path to cooling more than 1000W+ TDP.
Operations
For those new to the liquid cooling scene, we understand that submerging servers can seem like a daunting prospect, especially with the perception that working with liquid might complicate operations.
Removing the Barriers to Adoption: Minimal & Straightforward Operations
However, this is not the case! In reality, immersion cooling significantly reduces failure rates, limiting the amount of operations required in general. For the very few remaining operations, we optimize our products and the integrated servers systems. Plus, it only takes a small amount of time to train operational personnel to transition from a standard rack operations to immersion cooling.
Tightening Sustainability Regulations
The global push for sustainability is driving the emergence of new regulations.
Reporting regulations, such as the Emissions Disclosure Law (SB 253)3 and requirements from the Securities & Exchange Commission4, mean that data center operators need to closely monitor their emissions.
Water scarcity and the subsequent need to improve Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) is crucial. Hyperscalers are being targeted with strong regulations and pressure from communities, adding complexity to the site selection process.
Removing the Barriers to Adoption: Efficient Energy & Water Consumption
Immersion cooling stands out as a leading solution to these challenges. It allows high-density compute systems to run with very warm water, eliminating the need to produce cold water and enabling the use of sustainable dry cooling technology.
Our immersion cooling systems are designed to operate with water temperatures as high as 40°C in some scenarios, making it possible to maintain cooling efficiency year-round, even in diverse climates. This reduces reliance on evaporative cooling methods, which typically consume large amounts of water. Customers can implement chiller-based peak shaving strategies so that, in cases where dry cooling alone cannot maintain the necessary temperature, a minimal amount of energy can be used for chilling, with the opportunity to eradicate water consumption.
More to Come for Immersion Cooling
In this blog post, we’ve seen that immersion cooling has what it takes to overcome the typical barriers to adoption by simplifying your environment, making operations straightforward and efficient, and meeting your sustainability goals.
However, this is just the beginning of what immersion cooling can offer – through tackling these barriers to adoption, our technology also reduces complexities, cuts costs across the board, and covers next-generation tech.
