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LIQUID COOLING is coming to your data center. It's not a matter of whether you want it or not. A migration from air to direct liquid cooling is simply the only option that can address surging data center energy costs and allow the power densities of servers to continue to increase into the next decade. It will be too expensive not to adopt it. And it's coming sooner than you might think.
If it were up to engineers, direct liquid cooling would have been here five years ago, says 25-year IBM veteran Roger R. Schmidt, a distinguished engineer with experience designing water-cooled mainframes. He expects distributed systems to follow in the mainframe's footsteps.
Some data center managers may not fully grasp the problem, because over the past eight years, server performance has increased by a factor of 75 while performance per watt of power has increased 16 times, according to Hewlett-Packard Co. But data centers aren't using fewer processors - they're using more than ever. Meanwhile, the power density of equipment has increased to the point where power and cooling systems vendor liebert Corp. is supporting clients with state-of-the-art server racks exceeding 30 kilowatts (kW).
That creates two problems. First, energy costs are spiraling upward. Many data center managers don't see that today, because their power use isn't...