Energy costs are absolutely crushing data centers right now, and honestly, it’s only getting worse. As servers keep running hotter and workloads become more extreme, the traditional air-cooling systems that we’ve all relied on for decades are starting to feel broken (in many use cases, they are). It means eye-watering electricity bills and sustainability concerns that keep executives awake at night.
Enter liquid cooling. This new solution has become a real option for data center operators who are searching for ways to save costs and actually improve efficiency. Liquid cooling is capable of removing heat from components far more efficiently than air ever could.
Facilities leveraging liquid cooling are able to reduce their energy usage, shrink their carbon footprint, and make sure everything is still running seamlessly as computing demands continue to rise.
If you’re involved in data center management now or are considering a future upgrade, figuring out how liquid cooling could help you mitigate rising energy costs could be just the budget saving thing you’ve been waiting for.
Rising Costs of Concern for Data Centers
The reality is that data centers are energy hogs. The facilities consume as much as 1% of global electricity and the number keeps climbing. Now with the workloads of artificial intelligence ballooning, the demand for cloud computing soaring, and hardware consuming power faster than it can be produced, the energy dilemma is real.
Traditional air cooling is part of the problem. Those big HVAC systems don’t only cool your servers, they have to exhaust heat that is always pouring into the atmosphere from the fans and cooling equipment. That’s like trying to cool your house with the oven door open.
When you look at operational budgets, the numbers are pretty disheartening. Energy costs can be at least 25-30% of a data center’s total operating budget, sometimes more. And when electricity prices are going up and you’re running more equipment than ever before, those bills can skyrocket, and quickly.
How Does Liquid Cooling Work?
The underlying principle of liquid cooling is quite simple, liquid is simply much better at moving heat than air is. We’re talking about thermal conductivity levels that are several magnitudes higher than available thermal manipulation in air-based systems.
There are a few different means of cooling to choose from; direct-to-chip cooling places liquid right where the heat is produced typically placing cold plates directly on the processors. Immersion cooling literally dips the entire server into specially engineered coolant fluids. Rear-door heat exchangers sit behind server racks, and try to steal that heat as it is escaping into the room.
The efficiency advantages are astounding. Instead of moving massive amounts of air around to move heat out through a heat exchanger, you are moving relatively small amounts of liquid, which can absorb and transport so much greater a quantity of thermal energy. Additionally, modern liquid cooled systems have safety systems to contend with potential failure including closed-loop systems, leak detection, and interestingly enough none of the coolant fluids we use can damage electronics in the event of failure.
Energy Savings and Improvements in efficiencies
This is where liquid cooling can really shine. The pce? Power Consumption Efficiency scores, that tell the story: the load of the power used up if we can eliminate cooling fans or sometimes totally eliminate the chillers for a certain number of applications. Effectively we are swapping power sucking fans and chillers that is traditional with data centres at least some of the time.
Along with actual liquid cooling cooling systems, most data centres with air cooling to have Pce scores of between 1.4 and 1.8, meaning that 40-80% of power actually used is NOT consumed for computing. Relatively designed liquid cooled systems can get Pce scores from below 1.1 and occasionally under.
Interestingly, many data centres can actually recover waste heat. Instead of rejecting the thermal energy to atmosphere, some facilities admit that that waste heat can be used for building heat or utilized by district heating systems. Effectively you are converting waste energy into useful.
Liquid cooling can open up rack density quite a bit without frighteningly multiplying our energy costs, in fact, we can put more computing into that same space without even getting near our thermal or power limits.
Cost and Implementation
I won’t sugar coat this at all. Liquid cooled systems will usually be more expensive to deploy than traditional air cooled solutions. Deployment with liquid cooled systems almost always has specialized equipment costs, not to mention different infrastructure requirements combined with some type of facility alterations.
Where you have costs is it is not unusual that the initial upfront capital will be recovered by energy savings in use in the near terma. Dependent upon your current energy costs and usage patterns to return on your investment at periods of 2-4 years, much faster in areas with a high energy cost.
Many regions also have economic incentives available for energy efficiency upgrading programs. Many times the utility companies have funds available for economic incentives and rebates aimed at projects that will improve energy efficiency, or work to reduce peak power.
The Smart Move
For data centres they are definitely between a rock and a hard place as they try to meet energy demands and need in the environment of rising energy costs. Liquid cooling actually provides an opportunity to really rethink energy consumption in the data centre. Not only managing temperatures smartly, but also potentially realizing significant reductions in specified power consumption, reductions in overall operational expense without interfering with existing computing loads, and reaching sustainability objectives.
Yes you will have higher upfront expenses as well and your savings would not be returned in one night, but on the extended horizon, primarily when you are managing some of the high powered densities. For data centre owners/operators that want to build future proof expense control and have a legitimate future part to play in computing density, liquid cooling may potentially the only way to stay competitive when computing demand increases every year.