The State of Innovative Liquid Cooling in Data Centers

Isn’t the first rule in data centers not to get the servers wet? They’re kind of like Gremlins in that way. But someone forgot to tell Daniel Pope this fact.

Pope, the CEO of Submer, thinks data servers belong submerged in liquid. He was thrilled to speak to host Raymond Hawkins about his immersion cooling technology, which provides a new green approach to data centers, on this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center.

Born and raised in England and now residing in Barcelona, Pope began his career at 16 when he started his first data center. Beginning with a single server in his bedroom, Pope grew his business to more than 20,000 servers. With his expertise in data centers set, Pope now loves the challenge of pushing technology and the industry further.

Today’s increasing demands on data centers pose a cooling challenge – one Pope knew he wanted to solve. And that set him off to help develop immersion cooling technology, the solution Submer focuses on today.

“Instead of cooling the electronics and the server components with air, we leverage a dielectric fluid, a nonconductive fluid, which captures and transports the heat in a much more efficient way than air,” Pope said.

The initial challenge for Pope was how to use this technology to cool the racks without disrupting the rest of the data haul and data center design. “And, now, further into this journey, we’re looking at it from the whole data center point of view,” Pope said.

Pope’s immersion cooling system works for solid-state drives, NVMe, flash drives and helium-sealed drives.

Immersion cooling reduces IT power load in the center by removing all the fans from the servers. And, from a density perspective, the density is ten-fold. “We are deploying immersion tanks that are in the range of 100kw that operate with extremely warm water, which means the overall facility PUE (power usage effectiveness) is reduced to around 1.04 to 1.05,” Pope said. And that PUE number is before the energy savings from the fan removal are calculated.