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Immersion cooling no longer reserved for the hyperscalers, HPC

With increasing density in a smaller footprint, small shops finally have datacenter dunking dibs

Immersion cooling has long been the domain of larger datacenter operators but with increasing density and therefore smaller datacenter facilities, there is a need for shops of all sizes to get around heavy-duty AC and air cooling.

This is the target for German server maker RNT Rausch, which has teamed up with cooling specialist Submer to provide immersion cooling for RNT's server and storage systems

The partnership means businesses of any size can deploy liquid cooling in their datacenter. A relatively small space is required for this as it eliminates the need for air-conditioning units to cool servers, or for expensive and sophisticated fire extinguisher systems, the companies said.

Submer's technology provides active single-phase immersion cooling for servers and storage, and the partnership sees this being applied to RNT's Tormenta Varioscaler server portfolio and BigFoot Storage Systems.

Single-phase immersion cooling means that the coolant never changes state (ie, it does not evaporate into a gas) and is simply pumped through a heat exchange to transfer the heat to a water-cooling circuit. The coolant is a dielectric liquid that conducts heat but not electricity, meaning that all or part of the server can operate while submerged in it.

According to RNT and Submer, traditional cooling methods carry high costs in energy consumption and water. For many organizations this means wasting money on these resources, which also take up a lot of space. The pair claims that an air-cooled environment needs up to 10 times more space than environments built with immersion cooling.

"This partnership allows RNT Rausch and Submer to offer a complete and sustainable HPC turnkey solution that is specifically designed to the client's needs," said Submer CEO and co-founder Daniel Pope. "Partnerships like this are vital for the industry going forward."

It isn't just HPC deployments that may be needing liquid cooling soon. According to Cisco, the next generation of processors from AMD and Intel are likely to hit 400W of power consumption, while high-end GPUs are already there and show no signs of stopping.

Speaking to our sister site The Next Platform, Dattatri Mattur, Cisco's senior director of engineering for its Cloud and Compute Business, said this means that air cooling will soon be insufficient for even mainstream servers, and that many datacenters will need to use some form of liquid cooling.

RNT said that it offers tailor-made products and services for customers, with the Tormenta Varioscaler providing rack-mount servers from 1U to 3U with a choice of AMD or Intel CPUs and configurable SSD and HDD options. The BigFoot storage systems go up to BigFoot XXLarge, a 4U chassis for up to 48 drives, 8 x Sata SSDs and 4 x U.2 SSDs. ®

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