5 ms·

I really cannot understand why this is not more prevalent. The cost savings of not having air conditioning for a datacenter should be well worth any mess of oi

by amalag 14y ago

I really cannot understand why this is not more prevalent. The cost savings of not having air conditioning for a datacenter should be well worth any mess of oil.

amalag 14y ago
The articles around this are interesting and consider how it could become prevalent and they rightfully point to high performance computing. I think another obvious area is countries like India which have very high costs for power and do not have much in the way of existing datacenters.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tmurray 14y ago
  Immersion cooling was used on the Cray-2 supercomputer with Fluorinert[1]. Water cooling is fairly common in high-end supercomputing setups (I think all the BlueGene systems are water-cooled, for example). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2
hristov 14y ago
It is not prevalent because they are still testing it and the oil servers are not yet available for purchase. I do hope when they do become available that the price is not too high.
- a5seo 14y ago
  seems close: http://www.asetek.com/server/sealed-server.html http://www.asetek.com/server/sealed-server.html
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ars 14y ago
There are lots of problems. First the standard vertical rack wouldn't work - you would not be able to remove any blades from the rack since they are submerged. You would not be able to lift the entire rack out of the tub, since you might not have enough height, but worse the other computers in that rack would probably burn up from a sudden loss of cooling. So you would have to switch to horizontal racks, so you would lift one blade out without affecting the others. Of course that wastes tons of space. If you want lots of servers you would need multiple racks one above the other - but then how would you service the upper ones? And you are wasting space again - you need air height above each rack. Normally in a vertical server, the gap you need to remove the server is the same gap you need to walk there, so no extra wasted space. And then there are weight issues - a typical 21.5 inch x 19 inch x 8 feet rack would weigh about half a ton just from mineral oil! (Not including any metal.) Good luck building something strong enough to hold lots of them, and forget mounting them one above the other. All of this can be designed around, but it's not a simple matter - for now you would need to make it custom.
- ksec 14y ago
  My thoughts exactly, although most of the time Space should be cheap enough where the DC are located. But you would need at least 2 - 3x the size of DC to handle that. The Oil also needs money, and the extra cost to handle the construction, etc. And if google could already achieve 10- 20% figure then it is properly not worth while to do it within that 18% savings.
- PayUpPal 14y ago
  Blades in huge datacenters are not serviced one by one. Typically you'd wait until say 20% of the blades fail and only then fix and upgrade the whole rack at once.
- grandalf 14y ago
  What you describe are not faults they are tradeoffs. Perhaps instead of having 14' ceilings and sub-floors and AC a datacenter would have 6' ceilings and no AC. Whether the technology makes sense depends on the overall cost effectiveness. Google putting a data center near a river and using the river water in a complex water cooling system, or routing used non-potable water to provide cooling are both systems that are used today and likely have at least as many challenging aspects, yet are in use today b/c they lower overall costs.

by amalag 14y ago

I really cannot understand why this is not more prevalent. The cost savings of not having air conditioning for a datacenter should be well worth any mess of oil.

amalag 14y ago

The articles around this are interesting and consider how it could become prevalent and they rightfully point to high performance computing. I think another obvious area is countries like India which have very high costs for power and do not have much in the way of existing datacenters.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tmurray 14y ago
Immersion cooling was used on the Cray-2 supercomputer with Fluorinert[1]. Water cooling is fairly common in high-end supercomputing setups (I think all the BlueGene systems are water-cooled, for example). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2

hristov 14y ago

It is not prevalent because they are still testing it and the oil servers are not yet available for purchase. I do hope when they do become available that the price is not too high.

a5seo 14y ago
seems close: http://www.asetek.com/server/sealed-server.html http://www.asetek.com/server/sealed-server.html

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ars 14y ago

There are lots of problems. First the standard vertical rack wouldn't work - you would not be able to remove any blades from the rack since they are submerged. You would not be able to lift the entire rack out of the tub, since you might not have enough height, but worse the other computers in that rack would probably burn up from a sudden loss of cooling. So you would have to switch to horizontal racks, so you would lift one blade out without affecting the others. Of course that wastes tons of space. If you want lots of servers you would need multiple racks one above the other - but then how would you service the upper ones? And you are wasting space again - you need air height above each rack. Normally in a vertical server, the gap you need to remove the server is the same gap you need to walk there, so no extra wasted space. And then there are weight issues - a typical 21.5 inch x 19 inch x 8 feet rack would weigh about half a ton just from mineral oil! (Not including any metal.) Good luck building something strong enough to hold lots of them, and forget mounting them one above the other. All of this can be designed around, but it's not a simple matter - for now you would need to make it custom.

ksec 14y ago
My thoughts exactly, although most of the time Space should be cheap enough where the DC are located. But you would need at least 2 - 3x the size of DC to handle that. The Oil also needs money, and the extra cost to handle the construction, etc. And if google could already achieve 10- 20% figure then it is properly not worth while to do it within that 18% savings.
PayUpPal 14y ago
Blades in huge datacenters are not serviced one by one. Typically you'd wait until say 20% of the blades fail and only then fix and upgrade the whole rack at once.
grandalf 14y ago
What you describe are not faults they are tradeoffs. Perhaps instead of having 14' ceilings and sub-floors and AC a datacenter would have 6' ceilings and no AC. Whether the technology makes sense depends on the overall cost effectiveness. Google putting a data center near a river and using the river water in a complex water cooling system, or routing used non-potable water to provide cooling are both systems that are used today and likely have at least as many challenging aspects, yet are in use today b/c they lower overall costs.