Iceotope study says liquid immersion is viable for hyperscale disk storage

Liquid cooling institution Iceotope has conducted a study pinch Meta into nan feasibility of utilizing its exertion to meet nan cooling requirements of nan high-density retention drives that are progressively being deployed by hyperscale datacenter operators.

According to Iceotope, nan recently published study indicates that immersion cooling offers benefits including reduced vibration and equalized somesthesia crossed a JBOD array, successful summation to improved thermal management.

Rotating drives would not usually beryllium considered for immersion-based cooling techniques arsenic these typically telephone for each moving parts, specified arsenic fans, to beryllium removed successful bid for a strategy to beryllium wholly submerged successful coolant. Solid authorities drives (SSDs) are usually fitted instead.

However, for immoderate customers specified arsenic hyperscale operators and high-performance computing (HPC) sites, nan sheer volumes of information that they shop and grip make it presently excessively costly to usage conscionable SSDs, and alternatively high-capacity difficult drives are still very overmuch successful use. According to figures from retention patient Seagate, much than 90 percent of nan information successful unreality datacenters is held connected HDDs, and nan remainder connected SSDs.

As nan measurement of information generated keeps increasing, this intends much retention is needed. Disk thrust makers person been adding platters and actuators (read/write heads) to present ever greater capacity, which translates into much powerfulness being utilized and truthful nan power they generate, Iceotope said.

But nan preamble of helium-filled difficult drives complete nan past decade has not only improved disk capacity (helium reduces drag, cutting nan power needed to rotation nan platters), it intends that nan units are now sealed, opening nan anticipation of utilizing liquid cooling pinch them.

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Iceotope said nan study looked astatine an air-cooled, high-density retention strategy that had been re-engineered to usage its single-phase immersion cooling instead. It comprised 2 azygous socket nodes pinch 2 SAS expander cards, web paper and a powerfulness distribution committee successful a 4U chassis (actually nan somewhat taller OpenU aliases OU rack portion format defined by nan OCP), on pinch 72 difficult drives.

According to Iceotope, nan study demonstrates that its precision immersion cooling is simply a much businesslike intends of cooling difficult drives. It said that nan variety successful somesthesia betwixt each 72 HDDs was conscionable 3°C, sloppy of location wrong nan enclosure, and that nan the drives could run reliably successful rack h2o inlet temperatures up to 40°C.

The power required to tally this system-level cooling was little than 5 percent of nan full powerfulness consumption, it said.

Iceotope head of Innovation Neil Edmunds claimed nan study demonstrates that liquid cooling for high-density retention is capable to support nan drives astatine a lower, much accordant somesthesia for less thrust failures and little full costs of ownership.

"As request for information retention continues to escalate, truthful will nan solutions needed by hyperscale datacenter providers to efficiently cool nan equipment," he said successful a statement.

Iceotope was 1 of nan companies demonstrating liquid cooling tech astatine nan caller SC22 Supercomputing Conference successful Dallas. ®