According to a report in the Indian press, IBM has agreed to license its technology for cooling servers with water instead of air to Chicago-based Panduit.
The global networking and electrical manufacturer, will license IBM's Rear Door Heat eXchanger product, a five-inch deep cooling door to be mounted on the back of a conventional server rack in a data center. Water courses through the door, cooling the processors in the server hardware.
According to an IBM spokesman, the water-cooled system can reduce server heat output in data centers by up to 55 percent, compared to air-cooled technology.
High energy costs have made the technology more viable, in spite of the reservations of IT administrators over the expense of water-cooling technology, and concerns over water systems leaking.
At the beginning of the year, HP introduced water-based cooling system for its high-density servers, whilst blade server maker Egenera Inc., introduced a product called CoolFrame that integrates Liebert Corp.'s X-Treme Density cooling technology into a blade architecture.

Vote in our user poll - How will your critical racks be cooled in the next 12-24 months on the Zerodowntime home page.

Panduit will be presenting a paper at the forthcoming Datacentre Dynamics Chicago event, 5 October. Full details can be found by visiting www.datacentredynamics.com