Smart Cooling: What if … your datacenter was a 90’s movie?

Superpowerful tornadoes, global flooding, a destructive eruption – these are just some of the situations in which you never want to find your datacenter. But what Hollywood scenario would be the most effective at cooling your servers?

Today, there are over 7 million datacenters around the world. These infrastructures alone represent the 4th greatest source of electricity consumption on the planet and, by 2025, they could be responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. A datacenter’s main source of energy consumption is its cooling system. PowerEdge servers now offer several Smart Cooling options to maintain high-level performance while limiting the datacenter’s energy footprint.?

Air Cooling – a row of smart twisters

The most common cooling method is Air Cooling, which consists of sending cold air into the rooms to cool the servers. But there’s no need to create an F5 tornado to cool your machines. In datacenters, hot and cold aisle containment and row cooling have already helped boost the efficiency of air-conditioning systems considerably. With the latest-generation PowerEdge servers, we have also provided innovations that limit the intensity of the flow.

First, the servers are physically designed to optimise airflow inside the chassis. The shape of the motherboard, the perforations on the front panel and the dimension of the power supplies are just some of the details that have been optimised by our engineers, who have drawn on CDF (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to guarantee the best possible air circulation.

Next, thanks to OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager, administrators can define and automatically apply regulation and power supply policies, be it for a virtual machine, a server, a rack, a row or an entire room. This software intelligence, coupled with variable-speed fans, helps limit the intensity of ventilation.

“We don't want to get cows in our datacenters, right?”

Direct Liquid Cooling - cold plates along The River Wild

The second approach for cooling servers is DLC, our Direct Liquid Cooling. The idea is to replace heat sinks with metal plates attached directly to the processors and cooled by a water circuit (obviously fully waterproof). The water captures the heat emitted by the processors, before continuing on to a heat exchanger which dissipates this heat, before returning to the processor to begin a new cycle.

This not-so wild river offers five times greater cooling capacity than air. And to make sure that the Long Quiet River doesn’t turn into dangerous rapids, Leak Sense technology is there to prevent any escape attempts! Any cooling liquid leak, even minimal, will immediately be detected and signalled, automatically triggering the action defined by the administrator, such as sending an alert or shutting down the server.

“Now listen to me. Your data is not going to drown in it. Everything your organisation cares about is in this server. We can row this big water, and that’s the truth. We can do it!”

Immersion Cooling – your server in a Waterworld

The third way is immersion cooling. Here, the servers are immersed vertically, not in an infinite expanse of water, but in a container filled with a heat transfer fluid. The liquid, heated by the machines, is sent to a cooling tower that can evacuate the heat and send the cooled liquid back to the servers. Immersion cooling helps reduce infrastructure TCO by up to 50% and achieve greater density with a 40% smaller floorspace compared to an air-cooled datacenter. The method may seem innovative, but in reality it is completely mature and already deployed around the world. There’s no need to wait until 2500 for the water to have submerged the datacenters.

“Immersion is not just our destination, it is our destiny!”

High operating temperature – computing on Dante's Peak

Another solution to reduce cooling is obviously to let the temperature rise! Our servers are guaranteed to function for prolonged periods in temperatures up to 45 °C. Replacing the oldest equipment with more modern systems capable of functioning at higher temperatures could lead to significant energy savings.

“That, is a pyroclastic cloud.”

Conclusion

While we hope you never have to face a natural disaster in your datacenter, it's always good to be prepared with smart cooling options. Whether it's using a row of smart twisters, cold plates along The River Wild, your server in a Waterworld, or computing on Dante's Peak, PowerEdge servers have you covered.

But just remember, we don't want cows in our datacenters, but a little creativity never hurt anyone!