At this week’s DatacenterDynamics Converged Internet conference in San Francisco, the Aquila Group started talking about the planned rollout of their AQuarius Liquid Cooled Open Compute platform. With a claimed fivefold increase in potential rack density and a potential PUE of less than 1.05, this high-performance energy efficient platform has New Mexico data center Innava as the launch customer.

Aquila partnered with Clustered Systems to implement the TouchIT cooling plate sytem to deliver the waterbased cooling to Intel Kennedy Pass motherboards supporting Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi coprocessors, enabling very dense rack configurationswith up to 216 CPUs per rack plus 3 current generation Phi coprocessors per OU rack, making it a suitable environment for HPC applications. In a fully configured rack system, up to 27.7 TB of memory is supported. Cooling is done via the TouchIt cooling plate technology, fed by ASHRE standard 2” water inflow at up to 30 degrees celsius.

Unlike traditional direct to chip liquid cooling, the TouchIt technology cooling plate cools the entire motherboard. Metal covers my be placed on specific components to improved their contact with the cooling plate, but only the single plate is used, the server mounting system pushes the server against the cooling plate for maximum heat energy transfer. More details on the Clustered Systems technology can be found here.

For power, the racks use a rail system, with direct conversion from 408AC to 12V DC to provide power to each motherboard in the single conversionEach power supply supports up to 36 servers in 12 OU; maximum capacity is reached with 3 power supplies and 36 OU for 108 servers per rack.

Aquila did tell us that there has been a slight delay in the rollout schedule due to the relocation of a production facility that is critical to the manufacture of the stainless steel platyes used in the cooling product..Even so, they expect to begin bringing the liquid cooled racks online in October of this year.