Compared with conventional air cooling, liquid cooling provides benefits for data center owners such as higher energy efficiency, smaller footprint, lower TCO, enhanced server reliability, lower noise, etc. However, liquid cooling also has some drawbacks such as higher investment, retrofit or redesign of servers, new data center operation and maintenance skills required, etc.
Data center owners need to determine if liquid cooling is the right solution that solves the challenges they’re facing. In this paper, we present five reasons to consider adopting liquid cooling:
- Rising chip and rack densities
- Pressure to reduce energy consumption
- Space constraints
- Water usage restrictions
- Harsh IT environments
This paper describes each reason in detail and explains how liquid cooling addresses it.