Immersion liquid cooling is to immerse the server covered with dense red and yellow threads in a water-like liquid, only that the liquid is not ordinary water, but a special insulating coolant, and the heat generated in the server computing is absorbed by the coolant and then enters the external cooling cycle.
The energy consumption of a data center is roughly composed of communication and network equipment, power supply and distribution system, lighting and auxiliary equipment, and cooling system, of which the cooling part accounts for about 40% of the total energy consumption of the data center.
In the past, air cooling has been widely used due to its low cost and simple deployment. However, in recent years, with the rise of high-density computing, chip, server performance and single cabinet power density continue to improve, submerged liquid cooling began to be favored.
In the early days, data centers could still only rely on a few mainframes to complete local data calculations, which not only could not do distributed computing, but also could not provide services to the outside world. It was not until the mid-1990s that the Internet emerged and had a huge impact on the market. With the demand for companies to support Internet business applications, data centers were accepted as a service model for most companies.
After 2010, with the rise of cloud computing technology, cloud data centers have gradually come back into the limelight. Compared with the previous ones, the infrastructure of cloud data centers is more scaled, standardized and intelligent, with lower construction costs and more services carried.
Looking back at the history of data center development, it is easy to see that data has gradually become a new production factor, and its importance for productivity development is constantly rising.
As we all know, the carrier of data center is one IT equipment, and the computing power of all IT equipment is determined by the chip. From the current point of view, the power consumption of the mainstream chips of the entire server is growing, and even in recent years there has been a considerable slope up. As the power of the server chip grows from 100W, 200W to 350W, 400W, the power consumption of the server will have a doubling, which determines the single cabinet power density from the earliest 4KW, 6KW growth to 15KW to 20KW.
Obviously, under such a trend, the traditional air-cooling method can no longer meet the heat dissipation and cooling needs of data centers. Currently, air cooling technology is still used on a large scale. As we continue to enhance the air cooling technology, such as increasing its volume, area, heat pipe technology and various advanced technologies, as well as doing various optimizations at the data center level with the rack level and nodes, the PUE of the data center can also be reduced to about 1.2. But then we also found that even with all these optimizations, up to 20% of the energy consumption is still wasted on data center cooling and maintenance, plus the energy consumption of system fans. This is still not ideal for the carbon reduction goal.
