The increasing deployment of high-density disks has made the need for competent cooling solutions a desideratum.
The infinite sets of data drowning us require an equally competent storage disk which would not burn up on encountering large datasets. Iceotope has found an alternative solution through a study with Meta confirming the efficacy of chassis-level liquid cooling technology for high-density storage disks (HDDs).
The recently published study explores the advantages of improved thermal management, reduced vibration and equalised temperature across the JBOD (just a bunch of disks) configuration, resulting in lower failure rates and costs for data centre operators.
The study involved a standard commercial storage system consisting of 72 hard drives, two single socket nodes, two SAS expander cards, NIC and a power distribution board in a 4OU form factor. The hard drives were hermetically sealed, and helium-filled. The air-cooled system was modified by adding a dedicated dielectric loop connected to a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and pump. The temperature variations across the hard drives and cooling pump power were measured in the air-cooled and liquid immersion cooling systems.
The results showed that the temperature variance between all 72 HDDs in liquid cooling was 3°C, regardless of location inside the JBODs. At the same time, the HDD systems could operate reliably in rack water inlet temperatures up to 40°C. The system-level cooling power was less than five% of the total power consumption.
Iceotope’s Director of Innovation, Neil Edmunds, emphasised the need to provide solutions to hyper-scale data centre providers to efficiently cool the equipment, in the company statement. “The study demonstrated that precision immersion cooling for high-density storage successfully cools the drives at a lower, more consistent temperature for fewer drive failures, lower TCO and improved ESG compliance,” he said.
As hyperscale data centre providers are constantly increasing deployment and utilisation of high-density storage disks, with the increasing use of sealed units, the need for a solution that improves disk performance with less drag has become a prerequisite. Immersion cooling solutions’ virtually silent operation helps mitigate acoustic vibrational issues for drives often encountered with air-cooling solutions.
Iceotope Technologies Ltd offers liquid cooling solutions while isolating and protecting critical IT systems from the surrounding environment and atmosphere. Iceotope is funded by five investors, including ABC World Asia and nVent. The company raised a total of $73.4M in funding over 12 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on July 6, 2022, from a private equity round.
