Lenovo Boosts Data Centre Power With New Cooling Technology

Lenovo has revealed a potentially ground-breaking project that will see new cooling technology provide a significant boost to the power of its data centres.

The company has teamed up with the University of Birmingham to work on a Water Cooling Technology project to increase the compute capacity in its data centre offerings, reducing its hardware footprint and cutting cooling costs.

Cool off

Lenovo says that the project, which is a first of its kind in the UK, could reduce cooling energy by up to 83 percent compared to using air cooling alone, and adds only 4.5kW of heat per rack to the data centre.

The water cooling system, which took nine months to develop from start to finish, delivers water directly into the rear of the server to cool it, rather than using conventional fans.

Water is pumped internally through the server using heat-sinks that are directly attached on the CPUs, Dual In-Line Memory Modules, on board components, and IO, transferring heat into the water before being pumped away.

Water typically enters the system at up to 45°C; the subsequent heat transfer from the system components to the water typically results in the temperature increasing approximately 10°C and, in doing so, reduces the temperature of the system.

The system will eventually be connected to the University’s central ‘BlueBear’ HPC service and the technology will be used to power the University’s private research cloud deployment.

Several other major vendors have looked at liquid-based cooling in the past, as they look to provide more effective and intuitive systems.

This includes Fujitsu, which last year claimed that its Primergy Server Liquid Cooling systems was able to halve typical data centre cooling costs – a big plus when a typical data centre uses up to 40 percent of its power for cooling.

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