Iceotope-Meta study establishes the efficacy of immersion cooling

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.