UNCOVERING THE LAYERS
Neil Edmunds , Director of Innovation , Iceotope
front-to-back air-cooling or bottom-to-top immersion constraints that are present in tank solutions . While initial applications of Precision Liquid Cooling have been in a sealed chassis for cooling server components , given the increased power demands of HDD , storage devices are also an ideal application .
High-density storage demands
With high-density HDD , traditional aircooling pulls air through the system from front to back . What typically occurs in this environment is that disks in the front become much cooler than those in the back . As the cold air comes and travels through the JBOD device , the air gets hotter . This can result in a 20 ° C or more temperature differential between the discs at the front and back of the unit depending on the capacity of the hard drive .
For any data centre operator , consistency is key . When disks vary by nearly 20 ° C from front to back there is inconsistent wear and tear on the drives leading to unpredictable failure . The same goes for variance across the height of the rack as lower devices tend to consume the cooler air flow coming up from the floor tiles .
Liquid cooling for storage
While there will always be variances and different tolerances taking place within any data centre environment , liquid cooling can mitigate these variances and improve consistency . In 2022 , Meta published a study showcasing how an air-cooled , high-density storage system was re-engineered to utilise singlephase liquid cooling . The study found that Precision Liquid Cooling was a more efficient means of cooling the HDD racks with the following results : www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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