Cooling down your data center

If your servers are running in a hotter environment, you’re bound to suffer from performance drops which are plain bad for your business.

Cooling down your data center in order for your servers to run without heating too much makes so much sense that, right now, Liebert and HP (namely via the Cool Team) are preparing direct chip-cooling technologies destined for the commercial market.

Just over a year ago, Liebert acquired Cooligy which developed a server cooling approach that sprays chemically treated water onto a plate placed on top of a processor. In turn, over a hundred microchannels in the plate direct coolant onto a server’s processor hotspots. Cooligy says this technology is already in use in tens of thousands of workstations and it’s allegedly working pretty well.

To help you get the most from your cooling down efforts, here’s a quick list of things you should keep in mind:

• Go Dual – Make the switch from faster (and hotter) processors to cooler dual and multicore processors to instantly reduce heat generation.
• Alternate – Think up your data center floorplan so you alternate between hot and cool aisles to improve (and cool) the airflow.
• Get Closer – Move your cooling systems closer to your servers to ensure the cool air is concentrated in the right place.
• Look Underfoot – Be sure that perforated floor tiles are properly installed so they don’t impede the all important flow of cool air coming from under the floor.
• Plug Holes – Seal the holes and any other openings to prevent cool air from escaping and hot air from circulating properly.
• Aqua Savvy – Make greater (and smarter) use of water to cool the air in your data center or, even better, to directly cool down the servers.
• Small Works – Consider cooling your servers at the processor level.

Cooling down processors and electronic components with water (or other liquids) may scare some IT managers. The main reason being that liquids can damage computer components and cause fatal short circuits. Fortunately, spraying your server’s processors with liquid coolant (consider the SprayCool M-Series) can yield significant power advantages like doubling the amount of electricity available to power computers while significantly increasing the processing capability.

You could install your data center in the Canadian Arctic Circle and draft a policy of “letting the doors open all the time” but using water coolant on processors, at your current data center location, might be more practical.

Tags: data center cooling, chip cooling, coolant, liquid cooling, water cooling, web servers