Asetek Debuts New Inside Server Air Conditioning Server Cooling

Asetek is planning on showcasing its patented ISAC, or Inside Server Air Conditioning, reference design at the upcoming SC12 Supercomputing Convention. ISAC completely eliminates the need for CRAC, or Computer Room Air Conditioning, in a data center. All the air inside the server stays inside the server and recirculates as opposed to exiting and heating up the data center. In addition to that, each CPU is liquid cooled with Asetek's proprietary liquid cooling while a liquid-to-air heat exchanger inside the server cools the internal server air. Each component inside the server also sees the same temperature and air-flow as it would in a standard data center install.

According to Vice President of Engineering for Asetek Ole Madsen, "While this may sound complicated on the surface, this is brilliantly simple. The demonstration server we are showing here is a 100% standard Intel H2216JFJR 2U 4 node server and besides installing our liquid cooling system, we have not changed a screw, this is just engineering at its best."

The ISAC server will integrate with Asetek's RackCDU, which will provide substantial cost savings in data center infrastructure. Due to the fact that 100% of all the server's heat is being transferred into water, users can expect to experience savings of at least 60% on their cooling power bill with immediate payback often occurring. In addition to that, because the hot water generated can be reused for a facility's heating or cooling, data center operators can now achieve EREs of <1.

The ISAC, in addition to saving data center power, also has a strong value proposition where dust and other environmental factors are a challenge. Areas like military operations, field operations, container data centers and even Formula 1 paddock data centers can benefit from this type of sealed design.

Andre Eriksen, Chief Executive Officer of Asetek, added, "Up until now, if you wanted to remove 100% server heat by liquid, you would have to invest in very expensive and proprietary technologies with large cold plates covering the entire motherboard, memory modules, etc. ISAC has the potential to revolutionize the data center cooling market. Instead of cooling an entire building, you are now only cooling the tiny volume within each server and the associated benefits are obvious."

Source: Xbit Laboratories - Asetek Introduces Inside Server Air Conditioning Cooling Solution for Servers