Water cooling blade server?

[irishBoiler]

I'm going to start off saying I have zero experience w/ water cooling. Saying that, why don't smaller businesses (with like 1 cabinet of servers blades) use water cooling vs some closet/small room with the AC cranked to high 24/7? I would think it would perform better and be more cost effective? It is just that no one has commercially makes water cooling for blades?

Am I missing something here?

 

[jeremyshaw]

Not enough clearance, higher mantainance, and still needs to be individually checked for leaks.

Blades are business slot servers, right?

 

[Erasmus354]

Because you still need to get the heat out of the room, so you would still need the AC system. The watercooling then just adds additional expense and risk.

 

[jrdonnaruma]

Thats not even the main reasons, Erasmus, at least not in my opinion. Blade systems are designed to be small, superdense computing/storage arrays that provide as many services in the chassis as possible, to keep the compute/storage blades as small as possible. Adding a liquid type cooling system would be doable, but the size of the blades would prohibit the use of efficient liquid blocks, due to the little clearance for the block design, plus the extreme cost this would add to the blade systems. When you can get 14 physical servers in 8units of rack space, you dont have much extra room for inexpensive liquid systems in each blade. Plus the chassis itself would increase considerably in cost, due to having to add quick, drip-less disconnects inside the chassis for each blade. Ontop of that, in keeping with the blades purpose, you would have to be completely redundant and hot swappable, which means, pumps would have to be accessable, and hot swappable, with quick, drip-less disconnects, as well as the radiators.

While it would be fun to attempt, I don't think there is a current blade system that would allow such a thing to occur, all of the space is used inside the chassis, and there isnt much room to play with inside the blades. You would have to design and build a whole new blade system from the ground up with watercooling in mind. While it COULD be done, it is not a cost effective way to do things.

 

[Pyrex238]

I'm going to start off saying I have zero experience w/ water cooling. Saying that, why don't smaller businesses (with like 1 cabinet of servers blades) use water cooling vs some closet/small room with the AC cranked to high 24/7? I would think it would perform better and be more cost effective? It is just that no one has commercially makes water cooling for blades?

Am I missing something here?

Well, essentially the idea is sound. You would have to have a very large radiator/pump setup outside of the server room - preferably with a duct to atmosphere - that would essentially remove the heat from the equation - however the real problem is leaks and more importantly the layout of server racks. If you get any leak, anywhere in a blade server rack, the water is going to cascade down from that initial server, and onto each one below it. One of the most expensive waterfalls to ever be witnessed. What makes it even worse is to move water such a long distance (out of the room, or to a outside wall) it would require a very powerful pump, and thereby a high pressure system. That would only magnify the potential disaster and possible leaks. What money you would save with the drop in A/C bill would be immediately vaporized in a span of 10 seconds should ANY leak occur.

 

[crazjayz]

It's already been done, but it's damn hard to implement. Here you go, the Aquasar, brought to you by IBM.

 

[jrdonnaruma]

Hmm.. I would like to get my hands on one of those and rip it apart just to see how they laid it out.

 

[k1pp3r]

Blades are business slot servers, right?

Yes, the slide into a cabinet which is sealed at the back, no way to get hoses in there.

Could work for a 4U server though, there are some water cooled rack fans out there