oh yeah. I completely didn't write about the problems with oil immersion. Well, I'm far from an expert on the matter, but the idea does come up from time to t

oh yeah. I completely didn't write about the problems with oil immersion. Well, I'm far from an expert on the matter, but the idea does come up from time to time, usually with some home built thing or another. Now, 'water cooling' comes up more often than full-on oil immersion, but usually you talk about using non-conductive coolant, so 'water cooling' in the worst case is oil immersion. I mean, you will occasionally have leaks. The primary perceived problem with cooling with a liquid is that leaks suddenly become a really big deal. That's what'd scare me as an operator. what happens if there's a leak? I mean, air cooling systems usually have enough redundancy that even big holes in air pipes aren't going to overheat anything, at least at the nicer data centers, and the chiller fluid is far enough away from the servers that in the case of a leak the worst case is that the data center smells like mold for a while. (yeah, I've worked in some smelly data centers. no fun. But it wasn't a threat to our servers. the A/C was redundant, and there were drains.) There are other problems, I think, with how the hydrodynamics and thermodynamics of oil differ from the hydrodynamics and thermodynamics of air, but really I know so little about that subject that I can't speak intelligibly about the problem. Also, those racks look big, like they hold a bunch of smaller servers. what happens when I've got a hardware problem with one server and I've got to pull it out? do the remaining servers run okay? how do I work on the dead hardware? can I set it up on a test bench? will the dust in the room get in and clog up the works? will I need to test it in some smaller tank of coolant? Then, after that, you have the same problem as any new and unique system. Standard parts. We weren't born yesterday, we've all seen (and most of us have been burnt by) blades, and we all know that if you put yourself in a situation where you can only buy parts from one vendor, you get fucked. So once you solve the problems of oil immersion, you then need to standardize the set up. But yeah, like I said, I'm no expert at oil immersion, so some of these may be wrong. However, these are the sorts of things operators worry about when the subject comes up. Also, the idea of using standard coolant in and coolant out plugs on every server, you know, water cooling style, so every server would need water blocks on every hot part rather than just submerging the damn thing is far more common.