You might have read my earlier post regarding handling IT temperature, well, in this post I am bringing some new cooling technologies that use minimal power by using hot water to cool the systems.

The heading may look like an oxymoron, but read further about some projects which have successfully implemented this technology.

IBM’s SuperMUC
LRZ SuperMUC system was built with IBM System xiDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 servers. IBM’s new hot water cooling technology directly cools active components in the system with coolant temperatures that can reach as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

So how exactly are they able to use hot water? The logic is straightforward.

By bringing the cooling system directly to the processors, RAM’s IBM superMUC allows increased inlet temperatures. So when we use higher temperature coolants, the power to cool the coolant is reduced and the system can save up to 40% of power.

The system uses capillary pipes to bring coolant to the active component. The coolant picks up the heat and then leaves the system and cools itself down with the help of fresh air.

eBay’s Mercury Project
Dean Nelson, director of Global Foundation services for eBay, has designed a data center which can operate at 100 degrees. eBay deployed this data center container from Dell, where it was able to use a water loop as warm as 89 degrees Fahrenheit and still keep the servers running safe.

Dell warranties that its servers for fresh-air cooling solutions are capable of running at 110 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 1000 hours per year and 120 hours Fahrenheit for 100 hours per year. To make this possible the system is designed with an unusually tight “Delta T” (which is the difference between the temperature of air at the serve inlet and the temperature as it exits the back of the rack).

Even though these two project have different approaches, the power used to cool the systems is reduced as hot water is used to cool them. In turn using hot water to do this allows the use of fewer chillers.

Intel launches its latest power-smart servers, and challenger AMD buys low-power server startup SeaMicro.

Intel has launched its latest iteration of green servers, the Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. The new processors are 50 percent more efficient than the previous Xeon line, and connect to Intel’s Data Center Manager, which links its real-time power and thermal data to existing system management consoles.

This follows the news last week that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was buying SeaMicro, maker of a new class of power-sipping server chips.

Intel forecasts that there will be 15 billion connected devices and over 3 billion connected users by 2015. The amount of global data center IP traffic is forecasted to grow by 33 percent annually through 2015, surpassing 4.8 zetabytes per year, more than 3 times the amount in 2011. At these levels, each connected user will generate more than 4GB of data traffic every day – the equivalent of a 4-hour HD movie. This will increase the amount of data that needs to be stored by almost 50 percent per year. In order to scale to meet this growth, the worldwide number of cloud servers is expected to more than triple by 2015.

“The growth in cloud computing and connected devices is transforming the way businesses benefit from IT products and services,” said Diane Bryant, Intel vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. “For businesses to capitalize on these innovations, the industry must address unprecedented demand for efficient … datacenter infrastructure…”