Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon 321
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."
Re:Cut power in half? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Go green... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cut power in half? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Misleading by quote-out-of-context (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like they had no clue then. Building size doesn't produce heat, building contents do. People are 300W each, and you can probably assume computers to be ~200-300W each, too.
I'm a server admin, and I bet you'd like to see ME (Score:2, Informative)
The captcha word for me this time is "fondling". How strangely appropriate.
Re:Hurrah! (Score:3, Informative)
SEER = BTU / W.h (Score:3, Informative)
obligitory (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cut power in half? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, depending on the location, it might be easy enough to circulate the oil to cooling coils outside, but that still takes energy.
Given these guys obvious engineering expertise (not), I wonder if they have ever heard of Polyalphaolefin. Google "PAO cooling" for an idea. It is used for liquid cooling of electronics on military aircraft, and it seems very oil-like (at least when it spills). If it is good enough for the F-22, it is probably good enough for a web server.
Re:Problems: Connectors, HDD,degradation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dielectric Fluids "better"? I think not. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Heh - Fluorinert (Score:3, Informative)
The fluid was Fluorinert [wikipedia.org] and it was pretty expensive when I admin'ed the Cray II at NASA Langley back in 1988.