In the ever-expanding digital landscape, data centers are the backbone of modern businesses, powering everything from cloud services to artificial intelligence applications. As datacenter infrastructure continues to evolve, the quest for efficient cooling solutions has become paramount. Among the emerging technologies, immersion datacenter cooling stands out as a game-changer. With its unparalleled cooling efficiency, immersion cooling is redefining the boundaries of datacenter performance, energy consumption, and operational costs.
This post will cover the innovative cooling method offers numerous advantages over traditional cooling techniques, and presents a compelling case for its adoption in your datacenter strategy, whether you are looking from the perspective of an datacenter investor, operator or customer.
N.B. Whilst there are two main types of immersion cooling, single-phase and two-phase, the pros and cons of each have been discussed at length, and are linked at the bottom of the post.
By submerging servers in a dielectric fluid, we can achieve a heat dissipation rate that is 1000 times more efficient than air, leading to revolutionary improvements.
Higher Efficiency
Traditional data centers typically require an additional 50% of power just to cool the IT infrastructure. This results in a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.5, a measure of how efficiently a computer data center uses energy. In contrast, the best air-cooled facilities, like those owned by Google, achieve an optimized PUE of around 1.1.
However, most immersion-cooled systems are designed to operate with a PUE between 1.03 and 1.05, significantly outperforming even the best air-cooled facilities. They can also function without water, which presents further environmental benefits, but that leads to a discussion about Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), a measure of how efficiently water is used in a data center, and that's a topic for another time.