Water Cooling Cuts Data Centre Costs

April 10, 2007: Water-cooling is gaining in popularity among high-density UK data centres, with those implementing the systems reportedly enjoying significant power savings while satisfying the carbon footprint zeitgeist.

Knurr introduced its CoolTherm water-cooled server cabinet technology four years ago, and says that after a number of successful trials it is now implementing the system alongside traditional air-cooled systems.

The system is a closed-loop, low-noise server cabinet with up to 45kW of cooling capacity and zero impact on room ambient air temperature. The company claims that its system achieves an improvement of over 800% compared to typical high-density air-cooled cabinet systems, and 40% improvement in overall large facility operating costs.

Knurr says that the cabinets are fitted with a base-mounted air-to-water heat exchanger and have no reliance on the room’s ambient air. They use a building's readily available water supply and maintain the heat exchanger's input water temperature at 12C.

Pipework is installed into a conventional suspended floor and can, according to Knurr, be easily expanded by adding more cabinets and connecting them to the flow and return lines.

“Having introduced the first commercially available water-cooled cabinets in 2003, we now have in excess of 1,500 CoolTherm systems operating worldwide”, says David McGee Knurr UK General Manager. “The very positive results of these tests are now seeing full-scale commercial operation throughout a large number of substantial UK sites.”

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