Fujitsu Claims Huge Energy Savings With Liquid Cooling

Fujitsu has claimed that its Primergy Server Liquid Cooling systems can halve typical data centre cooling costs.

The company said that it has been the first vendor to deliver direct-to-chip liquid cooling to its customers around the world, enabling PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) reduction to as low as 1.06.

Slow Takeoff

It should be noted that there has been a relatively slow take-off of liquid cooling despite the expectation that it will play an increasing role in data centres in the future. Supercomputers of course have been liquid cooled for many years, but regular servers in racks have not.

The advantages of liquid cooling is that it removes heat more efficiently, and in a form where it can be re-used (to heat buildings etc). It also theoretically removes the need for large, noisy and power-hungry aircon systems.

Fujitsu says that when waste heat recycling (in comparison to traditional air-cooled systems) is factored in, it can reduce cooling costs by up to 50 percent.

This is a big deal because at the moment, a typical data centre uses up to 40 percent of its power for cooling. Thus any technology that can reduce this power consumption will be very helpful when trying to lower data centre operating costs.

And Fujitsu also says that its new Primergy systems are very helpful for data centre operators looking to maximise every meter/inch of processing power. It said that the new liquid cooled Fujitsu Server Primergy CX400 M1 and its cluster nodes increases data centre density by up to five times to a maximum of 160 Intel Xeon processors and 1280 memory modules per standard rack.

“With resulting Wattages of over 30 kW per rack, liquid cooling plays a vital role in keeping the data centre within an acceptable temperature range,” said the company. “In fact, Fujitsu anticipates that high density servers will reach more than 50 kW per rack by 2016, and so is putting in place today the modular and expandible technology that its customers will increasingly need in the future.”

Data Centre Design

“Fujitsu is revolutionizing data centre design, and is the first major vendor to deliver direct-to-chip liquid cooling for more efficient building and operation of scale-out data centres,” said Uwe Romppel, Head of Product Management Server at Fujitsu.

“Achieving a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) close to 1.0 shows optimised use of energy in the data centre. The Fujitsu Cool-Central Liquid Cooling Solution will enable our customers to achieve a PUE of as low as 1.06, while also simplifying the recycling of heat waste for use elsewhere,” said Romppel.

Fujitsu has already partnered with liquid cooling specialist Asetek so that it can deliver hot water, direct-to-chip, data centre liquid cooling technology which removes heat from ‘hot spots’ like CPUs, graphics processing units, and memory modules within servers, using an all-liquid path and ejecting the heat into ambient outdoor air without chilling.

The new Cool-Central Liquid Cooling Solutions (Fujitsu Server Primergy CX400 M1 and CX2550 M1 and CX2570 M1 cluster nodes) are already available on a project basis.

That said, general global availability is planned for September this year, and prices vary depending on configuration and region.

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