Modular Liquid-Cooled Server Cuts Cooling Costs 93%

A new computer server from Iceotope has modular liquid-cooled components which the company says can help cut a data center’s cooling costs by 93 percent.

The product is geared toward companies that want to upgrade existing, traditional air-cooled data centers, which Iceotope says can consume 30 percent or more of a data center’s electricity costs, according to a press release.

Cooling a typical air-cooled data center with about 1,000 servers costs about $788,400 over three years, Iceotope estimates.

Iceotope’s new liquid-cooling components are connected to a recirculating water supply that transfers heat from the servers to the air outside the data center, which the company calls “end to end” liquid cooling.

In a data center where all servers are configured this way, Iceotope estimates costs would run just $53,560 over three years, or 93 percent less than the above example.

Data center cooling has been a hot-button issue for corporate energy managers in the past year.

For example, Symantec Corp., an infrastructure software provider, is achieving significant business cost and productivity benefits including a projected energy cost savings of $2.1 million thanks to its ongoing “green” IT efforts. The cost savings is attributed to hardware device reduction and related power consumption savings from August 2007 to December 2010.

According to a white paper from Microsoft and Intel, the power-related capital costs for cooling, backup power, and power distribution are significant — roughly $25,000 per kW of IT power use — and together with the electricity costs account for roughly half of total annualized costs in typical data centers.