What are the advantages of liquid-cooled servers?

The so-called liquid cooling does not simply refer to water. IT refers to taking the liquid with high specific heat capacity as the transmission medium, taking away the heat generated by IT equipment or servers and cooling them down.

Compared with the traditional air cooling technology, liquid cooling technology has the following obvious advantages:

1. Heat takes away more: the same volume of liquid takes away nearly 3000 times as much heat as the same volume of air.

2. Temperature transfer is faster: the thermal conductivity of liquid is 25 times that of air.

3. Better noise quality: at the same heat dissipation level, the noise level of liquid cooling is 20-35 decibels lower than that of air cooling.

4. Power consumption and energy saving: liquid cooling system saves about 30%-50% electricity compared with air cooling system.

Although most servers or data centers in China still use traditional air-cooled cooling, with the implementation of the national "double carbon" policy and strict PUE value restrictions, most data centers that use air-cooled servers are facing the upgrade or comprehensive technical replacement of cooling technology, and liquid cooling technology has become an inevitable trend of server cooling. The PUE of traditional air-cooled data center is often greater than 1.8, that is, to make the server of 1000W run normally, it usually needs to consume 1.8 kW of power.

Because the air-cooled data center has an outdoor air conditioner, the compressor of the air conditioner needs to operate normally, and the energy consumption is high. Unlike the liquid-cooled server, it can control the temperature of the incoming coolant. As long as the temperature of the coolant can drop below 40 degrees, the normal operation of the data center can be guaranteed. The only electricity that needs to be consumed is that a circulating pump keeps the refrigerant circulating, and a CDU accurately distributes the refrigerant to each server, which means that most parts of the country can use natural cooling all year round without a compressor, which can make the whole. The PUE of the submerged liquid-cooled data center can even reach an astonishing 1.03- 1.07. However, the PUE value of the air-cooled system data center of the same scale is still between 1.3- 1.5.