IBM licenses water cooling technology

IBM has agreed to licence its Rear Door Heat eXchanger water-cooling technology to electrical manufacturer Panduit.

The move will allow customers and system builders to buy IBM's CoolBlue portfolio of hardware and systems management tools to manage power consumption and cooling for standalone systems, racks and entire data centres.

Industry analyst Gartner warned this week that companies with high-density data centres using blade technology for example, could soon find their electricity bill rising to half the IT budget because of the need to both power and cool equipment.

Originally designed specifically for IBM server cabinets, the Rear Door Heat eXchanger is a 5in deep cooling door that uses chilled water to dissipate heat generated from the back of computer systems.

The design requires no additional fans or electricity, and has shown to reduce server heat output in data centres by up to 55 per cent.

Independent research has indicated that water can remove far more heat per volume unit than air.

According to Gartner, water cooling is significantly more efficient than air cooling, because water can carry 3,500 times more heat than air at sea level.

Products that cool racks from a local supply of chilled water are emerging and can cut cooling demand from 100 per cent to 30 per cent of computing power.

Gartner further contends that such a reduction could enable a 50 per cent increase in data centre equipment power capacity.

Panduit will collaborate with IBM's System X and Technology Collaboration Solutions teams to integrate IBM's intellectual property, engineering and development skills into the manufacturing of Panduit's own product offerings.

"Thermal management in the data centre has emerged as a key issue with our customers," said Jack Tison, vice president of technology at Panduit.

"As data centre compute densities and switch power supplies increase, and the kilowatts per cabinet continue to grow, so does the strain on infrastructure and ultimately the IT budget."

IBM pioneered the concept of water cooling in computing with the first mainframe computers over 50 years ago.

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