Immersion cooling, a method that has been evolving since the 1960s, is becoming a pivotal technology for managing modern data centers. In this article, we explore the various facets of immersion cooling, its historical evolution, and its growing relevance in addressing the infrastructure challenges posed by today’s digital business landscape.
The Basics of Immersion Cooling: At its core, immersion cooling involves submerging IT hardware directly in a non-conductive liquid to efficiently dissipate heat generated by the components. This approach offers unmatched efficiency and virtually limitless capacity. It is worth noting that liquid cooling, in various forms, has been in use since the 1970s.
The Evolution of Liquid Cooling: The journey of liquid cooling began within mainframe systems in the 1970s. In the 1990s, it expanded to high-performance gaming and custom-built PCs. Between 2005 and 2010, data centers started adopting liquid cooling with chilled doors, and in the following years, it found application in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, featuring direct contact and total immersion cooling solutions.
Addressing New Business Requirements: The current business landscape presents pressing challenges for data centers, including:
- Space constraints and time-to-market: Data center vacancy rates are at historic lows, necessitating innovative infrastructure design to maximize space.
- Efficiency and OPEX reduction: Businesses strive to do more with less space while lowering operational costs. Immersion cooling can increase density and reduce cooling OPEX by over 95%, alongside a 50% reduction in CAPEX.
- Performance and effectiveness: Achieving energy optimization and streamlined data center management are crucial for cost reduction and enhancing infrastructure effectiveness.
- Legacy infrastructure: Outdated solutions slow down modernization efforts. Businesses are exploring solutions like immersion cooling to modernize infrastructure while minimizing disruption.
Transitioning From Legacy IT: Modernization doesn’t mean ripping out legacy IT entirely. New IT components can work alongside legacy systems to make the transition easier. Immersion cooling technology aligns with these modernization efforts, addressing new and evolving applications and needs for HPC, IoT, Edge Computing, and Cloud.
The Role of Immersion Cooling: Modern immersion cooling solutions address several challenges, including sustainability, regulatory compliance, rising power costs, and the need to efficiently cool the latest generation of cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs. These solutions often come as modular, single-phase immersion-cooled data center platforms with integrated power, cooling, networking, and management capabilities.
The world of data centers is evolving rapidly to meet the demands of modern businesses driven by the ever-expanding digitalization worldwide. Immersion cooling, with its efficiency and adaptability, is at the forefront of this transformation. As businesses continue their path toward digitalization and greater efficiency, immersion cooling technology stands out as the clear and sustainable choice technological and sustainable choice for the future of data centers.
To date, Hypertec has successfully deployed over 250,000 cores cooled by immersion technology, solidifying our position as the innovator and leader in this field. Our TRIDENT iC 6th Generation series servers are specially designed for immersion cooling environments, delivering optimal energy efficiency and sustainability for high-performance applications.
If you’re eager to learn more, explore the Immersion Cooling section on the Hypertec website, where you’ll find detailed information about our solutions. Additionally, you can download our Data Frontier Special Report available in this section, which sheds light on the latest imperatives for data center efficiency.
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