The data center industry continues to warm up to liquid cooling

New data center challenges may enhance the profile of liquid cooling.

By Donna Donnowitz
December 26, 2014
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With 2014 nearly in the rearview mirror, IT decision-makers are hard at work looking ahead to a new year and the prospect of cutting-edge technology. Data centers are constantly growing larger, ramping up the need for cooling technology that can keep pace. Despite some lingering resistance to utilizing the liquid cooling, the method has gained its share of adopters in the the past few years and the technology seems bound to gain new converts as the advantages of liquid cooling become more widely known. There's more than one reason that immersion-based temperature control may be headed toward the mainstream, and understanding these factors will help you make the right choice for your expanding data center.

HPC will require increasingly effective cooling methods
Liquid cooling may have found its initial niche in the realm of the high-performance computing market. The rise of big data, government investing and greater use of large-scale computing performed by research facilities are all responsible for this trend toward HPC. With HPC is likely to come more liquid cooling, as many experts believe that immersion is the only cooling method capable of meeting the needs of exascale computing. The cooling method has also seen some applications outside of high-level scientific computations, suggesting that the technology may be gaining ground with a greater range of IT decision-makers.

Adoption calms hydrophobia resistance
One of the biggest reasons that liquid cooling has failed to emerge as a more popular implementation for the data center is the fear by IT staffs that getting computer parts near liquid is inherently risky business. However, not all liquid cooling solutions utilize immersion, and those that do have shown to greatly reduce the long-term costs of operating a data center. These feelings may shift as liquid cooling becomes the go-to temperature control strategy for the world's largest data facilities. Some may even apply a hybrid approach, such as using a remote console server to take advantage of a few liquid-immersed servers running at a different location.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.

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