The all liquid-cooled colo facility rush has begun

With AI and HPC workloads becoming the norm, we can expect a broader push toward high-end power and cooling technologies inside colo facilities. Companies like Colovore point to next-generation liquid-cooled colocation datacenters like a new one planned for Santa Clara, California, which will support even more powerful systems …

[vekkq]

If this means there will be a datacenter that is not loud and windy, I'd call it a win.

[Mayday]

This should have happened much sooner

I'm sure I'm not the only one in this forum that is accustomed to the lovely environment within a datacentre.

Not to mention having to account for power/cooling/hot or cold aisles/hot containment etc. in the design.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to spoil it for the commenters before me, but from the sound of the article the data centre will remain hot and windy - they're still using a rack-mounted radiator and fan, so it sounds like hot/cold aisles and traditional air con for now at least.

[Paul Crawford]

They might just be a touch quieter if the needed air speed is less due to larger radiator area as noise pressure level is 8th power of exhaust speed.

[John Robson]

And of course the fans no longer need to be 1u screamers, they can be 500+mm fans, moving vast amounts of air at a much lower rpm

[pavel.petrman]

250 kW per rack?

250 kW per rack? That's madness! Especially if one considers the use to which all those Kilwatts are going to be put: transcoding video files showing the morning coffee, making yet more private personal data avialbale to real time advertisement bidding, and worse.

On the bright side: the heat put into a reasonable cooling liquid can be used for heating purposes where hot air mostly can not. I've recently visited a Tier IV Gold DC with liquid cooling they'd built themselves. The owner listed following pros: heat output power coefficient of roughly 0.7 (see below why the servers actually consume less than designed power), much cheaper servers (they run HP Moonshots and got a deal with HP in which they don't need to buy all the fans, which cost a ton and make a considerable dent in the final bill, and the fans in the moonshots are some 20 W each, which is why they get to the 0.7 when they don't run the fans), all the kit can run at higher temperatures with same reliablity (he said something like 35 °C in liquid compares to 17 °C air), which in turn makes the removed heat usable without a huge heat pump. Their installed heat output is around 300 kW and they use it to heat a public outdoor pool nearby. This arrangement adds around 4 months of open season time every year to the pool.

[David Hicklin]

Re: 250 kW per rack?

> they use it to heat a public outdoor pool nearby.

And when the pool needs emptying for some maintenance, what do they do then?

[CrackedNoggin]

Re: 250 kW per rack?

I can't be any worse than the other 8 months of the year when they aren't heating the pool.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: 250 kW per rack?

Tsk! Don't you have Redundant Arrays of Hot Tubs?

[Potemkine!]

Produced heat can be reused. One of the secondary usage could be to produce electricity through Peltier modules

== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==

[David Hicklin]

> Peltier modules

my recollection of these is that they are not very efficient and the power output is small.

I could be wrong so feel free to correct me!

[John Robson]

You're right... the way to use "waste" low grade heat is to use it as heat.

I can't remember where I heard about a building that ran their heating from the waste heat of the data centre, with a swimming pool in the building primarily as a heat battery.

Pretty sure we've had swimming pools heated with the waste heat from an adjacent crematorium as well.

The lack of an obvious sink during the summer isn't an issue - it's just returning the system to it's previous state. Of course you could use a heat pump to provide hot water, since the increased input temperature would result in an excellent COP.

[TheRealRoland]

Mandatory scuba classes for new hires?