Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon

grease_boy writes "A UK company will start selling server racks submerged in oil baths within a year. Very-PC is working on prototypes and says that because oil transfers heat more efficiently, power usage can be cut by fifty percent."

Heh

[peterprior (319967)]

Bring a whole new meaning to Oil in a rack...... geddit..

*grabs coat*

Re:Heh

[nacturation (646836)]

Does this oiled up rack run on 36 double D batteries?
 

Re:Heh

[thoughtlover (83833)]

Awww... I thought you were going to point us to a clip of C3PO being lowered into his oil bath. That's almost like a server soaked in oil, yeah?

Re:Heh

[cayenne8 (626475)]

But, aren't we trying to wean ourselves off dependence on foreign oil??

Why not start off right, and soak these in biodiesel or ethanol?

:-)

Re:Heh

[hobo sapiens (893427)]

thanks for the backup. Some people...sheesh

It was Curly, actually. In one Three Stooges short, Curly was covered in oil (from an oil well he just discovered, you pervs), and Moe said something like "Whatcha doin, knucklehead?" To which Curly says "You know what they say! The oily boid gets the woim! nyuk nyuk nyuk"

The Hot cha cha cha was Jimmy Durante, and I just added that in for kicks.

The funny part is that this post will get modded informative. If there are any other jokes that need in-depth explanations, I'd be happy to serve.

Interesting

[LordPhantom (763327)]

That sounds like a step forward. At least, until you consider that anyone working on them would get coated in oil... and frankly, server admins coated in oil are really something nobody wants to see.

Re:Interesting

[SNR monkey (1021747)]

There really needs to be a "-1 Disgusting" mod for posts like yours. It made me laugh initially, but then I shuddered when the mental image hit. I'm going to try not to think about that for the rest of the day. Or any other day for that matter.

Depends on the admin

[Opportunist (166417)]

I, for one, would definitly start lobbying for more female tech workers here!

Re:Depends on the admin

[suggsjc (726146)]

Hold on, that actually might be funny. A beowulf cluster of oil covered female tech workers?

Re:And since we're posting on /.

[drinkypoo (153816)]

I don't know about the industry as a whole, but the female IT workers here almost always seem to be adorable little asian girls.

I think all of slashdot wants to know... are you hiring?

Re:Interesting

[jd (1658)]

Slashdot ran a story on total-immersion computing using an oil bath, oh, four or five years ago now. He was using mineral oil. This is not to say it's a bad idea - on the contrary, it's rather overdue on the technology front. However, it does take about this amount of time to go from hobbyist to early market, so maybe this story should have been expected some time this year or next.

Liquid cooled computers, are so last millenium!

[140Mandak262Jamuna (970587)]

Get your liquid cooled super computers here [cray.com].

Hurrah!

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

This is fantastic! I can't see a single downside to increasing the demand for machine oil in this modern world, nosirree..

Re:Hurrah!

[Odiumjunkie (926074)]

Exactly, the website and business proposal seem very amateurish. They actually tried using motor oil before realising that by some strange, arcane and entirely unpredictable process it correded PCBs? Am I being too presumptive in assuming that these people know very, very little about electronics?

Why on earth they didn't at least think to use highly-refined mineral oil like transformer oil is beyond me. I mean, filling a server with motor oil? Are you kidding me?

Someone saw the Tom's Hardware cooking-oil-cooled-PC experiment that was published a while back, and saw an opportunity to make some money. They didn't realise that Tom's Hardware used oil because it was headline-grabbing, cheap, easy to purchase and --oh yeah-- wasn't being used to cool a server that had to be stable and reliable. That doesn't mean it's the best choice of coolant.

Hell, you could do it with purified water if you wanted to, but your uptimes might take a hit.

Dielectric Fluids "better"? I think not.

[Svartalf (2997)]

Fluorinert's ozone depleting.
Novec's a greenhouse gas problem.

Every other fluid in this class has the same set of issues, unfortunately.

They may be "clean" and non-toxic, but they're decidedly NOT environment friendly compared to oils-
and they're a hell of a lot more expensive than oils and not as effective at cooling things.

The reason why the fluids are used in the supercomputer industry is more the mess caused by the oils
on everything- and they're actively cooling the systems. Oils are actually superior to the fluids
in heat-transfer terms- it's why you have oil filled transformers for power distribution instead of
dielectric fluid filled ones. The specific heat of Novec is actually less than air's- the only advantages
these fluids have is that you can effectively move a LOT more of it quickly over a surfaces being cooled
without noise and you can refrigerate the stuff to below ambient to temperatures close to the freezing
point of water without condensation risks.

Oils tend to have issues with active cooling. Unless you're implementing vapor-phase, stirling cycle,
or aggressive peltier active cooling below ambient, you are actually better off with oils than the fluids
as they won't work as well at cooling- you'll be better off with air cooling.

This has been discovered by the overclock crowd and they have done a handful of oil-immersed PC's.
The main reason why you don't see a lot more of those oil immersed PC's is oil wicking
by the wires. Each point where a connector would be or a peripheral like a CD/DVD or hard disk is
hooked in has wires coming out of the system that will wick the oil or dielectric fluid out all over
the place. In order to deal with this specific problem, you'd have to resort to specialized sealed
header and other connectors for each edge case for SATA/PATA, VGA/DVI, etc. Those don't come cheap,
so the overclocker crowd tends to just resort to fishtank and similar plays for lan parties or
PAX/QuakeCon, etc.

So, in the end, it is a mixed bag. The oils are messier, but are actually more environmentally friendly
than the dielectric fluids- and they have a higher heat capacity and thermal conductivity in many cases.

Cut power in half?

[theantipop (803016)]

"It is possible to cut power consumption in half," managing director Peter Hopton told New Scientist. "You don't need to drive inefficient fans, or the usual air conditioning."

Do data centers really use as much power cooling the server farms as running them?

Re:Cut power in half?

[Spazmania (174582)]

Do data centers really use as much power cooling the server farms as running them?

More or less, yes. Efficiency on the A/C units is usually around 2:1 and sometimes approaches 3:1, that is you get twice the cooling as the energy you put in. Since nearly 100% of the power in to servers is expressed as heat, you need the same amount of cooling. Now add inefficiencies in the cooling architecture, power for fans in the servers, inefficiency of semiconductors when running hot, etc. When you add it all up you're approaching 50% of the total power consumption.

Its a disingenuous marketing claim though. Cooling oil is no more efficient than cooling air and convection won't be the final word at an industrial scale - they'll need pumps which consume as much energy as fans

On the plus side 10kva in a oil-cooled rack will be a hell of a lot quieter than 10kva in an air-cooled rack with a hundred 3cm fans running at 7krpm.

Oil Soaked Servers?

[pandrijeczko (588093)]

Do you want me to make the joke about "fried chips" or do you want to do it?

Problems: Connectors, HDD,degradation

[Flying pig (925874)]

They will have to run the HDDs outside the oil because they do, in fact, need ventilation. Though perhaps you can get totally sealed HDDs from somewhere by now.

However, the main problem I see is connectors. Existing connectors have been developed to work in air, except for a few exotic types. Watertight connectors are designed to work with wet environment outside and dry electronics inside, not vice versa, but in any case existing technology would require standard connectors to be used entirely submerged in dielectric. Modern connectors have much smaller contact surfaces than they did even ten years ago, and the distance liquid would have to move by capillary action before breaking the contact is quite small. It's hard to see how you could do accelerated life testing for such a system, which means it could be many years before we know whether they are reliable or not.

I recall when doing research involving electronics in Fluorinert we had to make soldered connections in liquid. Contacts that were frequently made and broken could be pressure contacts, but that is quite different from the situation in a server. And if we had known of a cheap substitute for Fluorinert we would have used it. The majority of oils degrade quite interestingly - you wouldn't expect bacteria to live in them but they can and do if the conditions are right.

These guys may have a workable solution to all the problems, but I can't help thinking that technology will make the concept obsolete. How does the performance of an old Fluorinert-cooled Cray stack up against a modern server in flops and GBit/s of IO per watt? (Hint: Don't bet on the Cray.)

Re:Problems: Connectors, HDD,degradation

[YGingras (605709)]

The design with the Cray 2 was a bit excessive. They just had the heat reach fluorinert's boiling point and there was a vapor collector and a condensor tower [flickr.com]. As you'll recall, the temperature of a liquid will not never exceed the boiling point until it all turned to vapor. That's why car are water cooled. If you have insufficient heat transfer from the radiator, the vapor pressure blows the cap and you have a really visual feedback that it's time to stop. You won't damage anything if you stop before you evaporate all your coolant. Fluorinert boiled at 56 C, a convenient temperature that makes it safe to work around the computer. Oil boils at 175 C. If you have a few boiling racks you will not want humans in your server room and you'll probably burn down your air cooled servers. Oil cooled system will not used the clever technique used by Cray: no pump or other circulatory system was needed and working temperature was ultra stable. Fluorinert and oil cooling are completely different things and I don't think you can compare them.

oil

[normuser (1079315)]

Oily racks you say? You know this just might catch on.

Just what overweight geeks need

[DanielMarkham (765899)]

It's not enough that we have jobs where we sit down all of the time, now we have a computer that's also a deep-fryer.

Or, if they use motor oil, will Penzoil and other oil companies start running TV ads? "I couldn't play DOOM 6 until I switch to 10W-40 ultra. Now I kick butt"

Maybe the computers can start coming with chrome valve covers.

job interview, 2009:

[circletimessquare (444983)]

"Hello, I'm reviewing your application and I don't see any IT exposure in it at all, no education, no experience... what makes you think that you're suited for a job at a server farm?"

"Well, I was a fry cook at McDonalds for 2 years"

"You're hired"

All that is old is new again...?

[vmxeo (173325)]

Didn't IBM use oil-cooling on one of their mini/mainframe computer systems back in the day? I seem to recall hearing stories of low oil indicators on the machines. Unfortunately my Google searches on the subject are coming up dry...

Re:Changing the oil

[aadvancedGIR (959466)]

I know it was a joke, but I fear that, by replacing air by oil, the weight of a server rack might be a problem if it is not located in the basement.

Anyhow, even by reducing the power requirements by using efficient passive cooling to evacuate heat from the chips to the room, you still need to evacuate heat from the room.