The recently published study with Meta suggests the advantages of improved thermal management , reduced vibration and equalised temperature across the JBOD , which leads directly to lower failure rates and costs for data centre operators . The hard drive systems supplied in a rack form factor in chassis drawers are an ideal fit for precision immersion cooling technology .

Neil Edmunds , Director of Innovation , Iceotope , said : “ As demand for data storage continues to escalate , so will the solutions needed by hyperscale data centre providers to efficiently cool the equipment . The study demonstrated that liquid 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 .”

High-density storage proliferating

With constant streams of data emerging from the Internetof-Things , video , AI and more , up to 463 exabytes of data is expected to be generated by each person each day by 2025 . How data is accessed and interacted is constantly changing , causing a real impact on the processing and storage of it . In just a few years , it ' s predicted that global data storage will exceed 200 zettabytes of which half will be stored in the cloud , according to Cybersecurity Ventures .

The liquid cooling system tested was an Iceotope precision immersion liquid cooling system – the air-cooled version was modified with the addition of a dedicated dielectric loop connected to a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and pump . Meta proceeded to measure temperature variation across the hard drives and cooling pump power in the air-cooled and liquidcooled systems .

The results are conclusive

The study successfully demonstrated precision immersion cooling was a more efficient means of cooling the HDD racks with the following results :

• Using precision immersion liquid cooling , the variance in temperature between all 72 HDDs was just 3 ° C , regardless of location inside the JBODs .

• Liquid cooling demonstrated that the HDD systems could operate reliably in rack water inlet temperatures up to 40 ° C .

• System-level cooling power was less than 5 % of the total power consumption .

• Liquid cooling ’ s virtually silent operation helps mitigate acoustic vibrational issues for drives often encountered with air-cooling solutions .

While precision immersion is found to be a superior alternative to air-cooling high-density disk arrays , other forms of liquid cooling including cold plates , tank immersion , or two-phase immersion , don ’ t preserve the operational benefits such as HDD density , user access for serviceability and ability to hot swap drives to the same degree . �

This presents a unique challenge for hyperscale data centre storage infrastructure . More data storage means more spinning disks , higher-speed motors and more actuators – all of which translates into more power being used . As disks go up in power , so does the amount of heat they produce . The introduction of helium into hard drive enclosures over the last decade has not only improved disk performance with less drag but with the units now sealed , the practicality of using liquid cooling solutions at HDD level has been opened .

The study showcases an air-cooled , high-density storage system re-engineered to utilise single-phase immersion cooling . The standard commercial storage system consisted 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 . intelligent POWER AND COOLING www . intelligentdatacentres . com

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