Computer server rooms are the ecological equivalent of storing a bunch of blower heaters in a giant coolroom. But people need their MySecondFaceLifeBook pages and so servers will get hot. Iceotope on the other hand, have a great idea for keeping all those hot and busy machines cool, especially as server densities keep increasing.

The Iceotope system uses a triple circuit, liquid cooling system that completely eliminates air as a heat transfer medium. The system immerses each server motherboard in a bath of inert coolant which is circulated via a pump at the back of the server rack. The hot coolant is in turn cooled by water from the building supply. Because of the increased efficiency of the thermal transfer the cooling water doesn’t need to be as chilled as with air-based systems. Ordinary tap water temperatures should do and the system fits very nicely into the standard 19″ server rack.

Iceotope claim that server cooling costs can be decreased by 93%, or if you were cooling 1,000 servers, you’d save around $788,400 in three years. The increased thermal efficiency means you can also cram more servers into a smaller space. That’s got to be a good idea, can someone tell Google?

Iceotope has developed a patented approach that tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres from the source of the heat – at the component level – to its final destination. The heat produced by the components inside each server is captured effectively by immersing the server motherboards in individually sealed baths of an inert synthetic liquid coolant. With the heat now locked in to a liquid, subsequent stages of liquid (water) cooling can be implemented to efficiently transport the heat from source to final destination in the air outside the data centre.

Tags: gadget, server+cooling, iceotope, iceotope+server+cooling