Liquid Blade Brings Immersion Cooling To Blade Servers 79
1sockchuck writes "In the past year we've seen several new cooling systems that submerge rack-mount servers. Now liquid immersion cooling is coming to blade servers. Liquid-cooled PC specialist Hardcore Computer has entered the data center market with Liquid Blade, which features two Intel 5600 Xeon processors with an S5500HV server board in a chassis filled with dielectric fluid. Hardcore, which is marketing the product for render farms, says it eliminates the need for rack-level fans and room-level air conditioning. In recent months Iceotope and Green Revolution Cooling have each introduced liquid cooling for rack-mount servers."
Re:serviceability (Score:3, Informative)
How hard is it to say; change a disk in one of the submerged nodes ? or fix a loose ethernet cable ? If the nodes are separated in compartments, and you could isolate and drain one while servicing it, this would be really nice indeed.
Have you ever been in a huge data centre? There are mostly systems not needing any human interaction for years and in fact people need a map and an index to find the system. Human intervention -e.g. for failing hardware- is usually cast into procedures whereby an "operator" does the work needed. Disk storage is usually separated form application servers. Etc...
Huge data centres analyse the used hardware used and usually set up a palette of system types to select from. (Therefore anything outside of "the palette" is usually possible at significantly higher costs.)
I take these data centres will be capable of analysing pros and cons for using immersion cooling. Higher server density and thus lower real estate requirements add up to significant savings for one.
Re:serviceability (Score:3, Informative)
that's PADI: http://www.padi.com/scuba/ [padi.com]
unless you were thinking about rice.. ;hot water, rice... server farms finally derserve their names !
Re:serviceability (Score:5, Informative)
We're talking about blade servers. they're not submerged nodes. they're submerged blades. storage happens on a SAN. What fucking year is it, anyway? In this design (big fat picture in the TFA, you lazy, reactionary fuck) each blade is sealed into its own unit which can be pulled separately. So it's even more of a non-issue. You just want something to complain about, when there is nothing to complain about. Thanks for helping make slashdot grate.
Re:The blind leading the ignorant. (Score:4, Informative)
Immersion liquid cooling is ... all well and good, it is after all HOBBY level tech.
Really? Cray started doing this back in 1985 [wikipedia.org], so I wouldn't call it "HOBBY level tech."
Renderfarms will not buy this (Score:1, Informative)
> marketing the product for render farms
I used to have root on a renderfarm with a few thousand cores and this is exactly the type of fiddly tech you want to avoid when you scale-out. Many renderfarms are located at multiple sites, mainly due to legacy but also for convenience and resilience. This means the majority of a renderfarm may be co-located where land and electricity is cheap and rely on high bandwidth connections to offices where transport and talent is plentiful. I know of two renderfarms which are split in this manner.
It means that really big renderfarms are co-located with shared cooling facilities. This makes fancy cooling methods very risky and unnecessarily expensive.
Re:liquid heatsinks? (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt sealing to the board would be very practical, it would be very hard to get a good enough seal there and anyway most of the heat comes out of a CPU through direct conduction to the heatsink anyway so I don't see a whole lot of point in immersing the CPU itself.
What you can get easily are "waterblocks" which attatch in place of a regular heatsink and take the heat from the CPU in the regular manner but are designed to transfer it to piped water rather than to the air.