Asetek, a leading supplier of liquid cooling solutions for computers, plans to showcase its patented ISAC (inside server air conditioning) reference design at SC12 supercomputer conference.

ISAC completely eliminates the need for CRAC (computer room air conditioning) in the data center. All air inside the server stays inside the server and recirculates rather than exiting and heating up the data center which also significantly relaxes the air dust quality spec inside the data center. Each CPU is liquid cooled with Asetek’s proprietary liquid cooling while a liquid-to-air heat exchanger inside the server cools the inside server air. Each component inside the server sees the same temperature and air-flow as it would in a traditional data center install.

“While this may sound complicated on the surface, this is brilliantly simple. The demonstration server we are showing here is a 100% standard Intel H2216JFJR 2U 4 node server and besides installing our liquid cooling system we have not changed a screw, this is just engineering at its best,” said Ole Madsen, vice president of engineering at Asetek.

The ISAC server will integrate with Asetek’s RackCDU, providing substantial data center infrastructure cost savings. Because 100% of all server heat is being transported into the water, users should expect savings of at least 60% on their cooling power bill, often with immediate payback. Because the hot water generated from the RackCDU can be reused for facilities heating or cooling, data center operators now can achieve EREs of <1.

In addition to saving power in data centers, the ISAC design has a strong value proposition where dust and other environmental factors are a challenge. Forward looking military operations, field operations, container data centers as well as Formula 1 paddock data centers will benefit from the sealed design.

“Up until now, if you wanted to remove 100% server heat by liquid, you would have to invest in very expensive and proprietary technologies with large cold plates covering the entire motherboard, memory modules etc. ISAC has the potential to revolutionize the data center cooling market. Instead of cooling an entire building, you are now only cooling the tiny volume within each server and the associated benefits are obvious,” said Andre Eriksen, chief executive officer of Asetek.

Tags: Asetek, ISAC, RackCDU, Intel, Xeon, AMD, Opteron