Datacenter Video Tour: Cooling Technology

We continue our tour of the largest data center of Intel in Russia, and talk today about the cooling technologies of this data center.

To begin, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Intel adheres to air-cooled cooling systems in its data centers and has developed a number of techniques that lower operating costs with this approach. Why not use other alternatives, for example water cooling?
Firstly, historically, it happened that Intel’s factories used air cooling at certain stages of the semiconductor manufacturing process. Based on this many years of experience, the IT service of the company has developed a number of methods for cooling its data centers. In addition, Intel data centers are large and more efficiently cooled with air. Providing cold supply and removal of heated air to the entire area of ​​the server room or room is simpler and cheaper than supplying and discharging water for each rack installed there.

Secondly, the water cooling system is more vulnerable. It's hard to argue with that. For example, there is a large server room that is blown with 20 air conditioners. As a rule, air conditioners are installed in Intel data centers in a configuration of at least N + 1. One conditioner fails - nothing terrible, there is redundancy. And what happens when the rack water cooling crashes? If the processors and survive, then the shutdown of the servers almost did not pass.
')
The principle of operation of the cooling system in data centers is as follows. Air conditioners drive cooled air under the raised floor, where it is evenly distributed around the perimeter of the entire room and blown back upward through special grille openings in the floor in strictly defined places to the front parts of the racks. It is worth noting that the temperature of the air entering the servers is 22-24 degrees. Then this air is taken in by the servers, inside each of which there are large fans, and passes through all the “insides” of the server: the processor, the motherboard, etc., leaving the reverse side already heated. According to the laws of physics, heated air moves to a low pressure zone, i.e. up and back to the air conditioners where the cooling cycle starts again.

The overall cooling technology of the data center boils down to the combined use of a number of simple but very effective techniques:

1. use of special dummy panels
2. the transfer of the entire cable infrastructure from under the raised floor to the space above the server racks
3. sealing of all holes in the raised floor
4. use of a false ceiling for intake of already heated air

In addition, in cases where particularly thorough cooling is necessary, special server cabinets are used with a built-in hood and a pipe leading into the false ceiling, through which all the heated air is blown to the air conditioners. This completely solves the problem of mixing cold and hot air, which greatly increases the efficiency of the cooling system.

Thus, despite the existence of the myth that air can not cool equipment more than 15-18 kW per rack, thanks to the use of the simple but effective methods discussed above, we could achieve cooling of up to 32 kW per rack in our data centers. .

You can learn more about these techniques and their effectiveness by viewing the video and reading the interview .