Gigabyte is partnering with three immersion cooling vendors to offer solutions. The company has launched solutions across a number of servers with several immersion cooling vendors to help tame the heat generated by modern servers. Something that was in the announcement gave us pause and we wanted to highlight it.
Gigabyte Launches New Immersion Cooling Solutions
First, the three partners are Submer, GRC, and Asperitas. It seems like the partnerships with Submer and GRC are the furthest along, with Asperitas catching up. The server models that Gigabyte is offering for immersion cooling generally have features like fans removed and firmware ready for immersion environments. They also are mostly the dense GPU and CPU servers that are most thermally challenged.
The table that caught our eye was this one. Gigabyte has a nice table with the immersion cooling vendors and their various tanks and offerings. For those looking at immersion cooling solutions, this is a fairly good guide.
There are other tank options on the market, but these are at least a comparison of some of them.
Beyond immersion cooling, Gigabyte also has direct-to-chip liquid-cooled servers. We covered How Liquid Cooling Servers Works with Gigabyte and CoolIT using a 2U 4-node AMD EPYC Milan platform.
What we know is that many of the next-generation servers will require some sort of liquid cooling so it is good that Gigabyte has options.
Final Words
Gigabyte working with various types of liquid cooling and different partners is important since we are seeing this as a trend in the industry. It is likely that for the next few years we will have several different types of liquid cooling available. Immersion tanks require more changes to data centers than direct-to-chip solutions, but some say, especially two-phase immersion cooling will be required to cool future chips. We see Gigabyte’s announcement today as interesting itself, but as we transition into the next generation of servers, Gigabyte having options is always good to see.
Indeed, even our SC21 coverage focused almost exclusively on liquid cooling solutions.
I worked with GRC mineral oil vats for 2 or 3 years before ending my data center career…It seemed to work reliably, fairly easy to install in a new data room and doesn’t need a raised floor. (Easy perhaps relative to all the per-server and rack plumbing for contact cooling).
Yes the servers are messy to work on (even with some sort of gowning, you are going to want to dedicate a change of clothes for oil vat server maintenance duties).
I see two issues with it: 1) GRC was never very helpful in how to mount the switches (twinax cables will wick oil slowly if placed outside the vat lower than the top of the oil)…Not sure if any switch vendor will warranty said gear if placed in the oil vats themselves…I had to MacGyver (solve) a switch wicking issue with our initial vats via the Lowe’s garden department.
2) I handled the server recycling…Not sure who would want to take hundreds of oil soaked servers off my hands. (The first gen of servers in the vats haven’t aged out yet).
Related to my above comment: It seemed to me that over the past 5 years, 2U/4Node 19″ rack servers were getting longer…In a recent visit to my old data center, I noticed that the new racks were taller (the servers are mounted vertically).
^^^ “New vats were taller”