Hewlett-Packard plans to start selling water cooling
systems next week to address power and heat problems caused by
ever-more-powerful servers in datacentres.
The Modular Cooling System attaches to the side of an HP rack of
servers and provides a sealed chamber of cooled air separated from
the rest of the datacentre.
The system allows a rack to consume as much as 30 kilowatts of
power, which is about three times more than what would be possible
without the system, said HP, without posing problems to the
datacentre’s cooling systems.
The Modular Cooling System requires a connection to an external
chilled-water system to work.
Processors are consuming ever more electricity and being packed
more closely together, meaning power and air conditioning costs
have been rocketing, particularly in large server farms.
What makes HP’s cooling system novel is the way the cool air is
re-circulated within the rack area.
The new HP system will initially work only with HP’s new line of
10000 G2 server racks.