Fujitsu’s embedded cooling technology, technology affirmation from Japan

Cooling IT equipment with airflow (can be cooled) is an extremely popular method that we can encounter even in the most popular products like personal computers, express in the air intakes and fans attached to the CPU or power supply used to continuously circulate the air in the room or cool air from the air conditioner through components inside the computer to cool components that generate heat, especially CPU, hard drive. With a number of specific devices, one can consider cooling by pumping cold liquid through metal tubes attached to components to help cool down. Meanwhile, Japanese technology company – Fujitsu – offers a breakthrough cooling method by immersing all devices in the liquid tank for cooling.

Advantages and disadvantages of traditional cooling technology for IT equipment

Air cooling is a “classic” method when people want to solve the problem of controlling the temperature of components in servers, disc cabinets, switches, firewalls, … This is the traditional method, and if you consider each device separately, the cost is very low, just arrange the exhaust fans and air holes on the front and back of the device to make the fan able to suck and rotate. continuous flow of air through the device to push the heat generated by the active component out. To achieve maximum efficiency, especially in data centers with very large numbers of machines, of course, it is necessary to invest in more accurate air conditioning systems and scientifically arranged cabinets to help the device get the maximum number of devices. Cool airflow and push away the maximum flow of hot air. Air cooling is based on a simple mechanism, but when operating it is quite “noisy” by the sound of the engine of the exhaust fan.

The most important and most productive part of a computer is the processor (CPU). For super servers like SPARC (using SPARC chips), PRIMEQUEST (using Intel® Xeon® Platinum chips), or parallel computing systems that link a multitude of node servers (such as Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY CX with lines Cascade Lake module of Skylake’s inheritance generation), CPU is responsible for calculating critical and bearing huge processing load, sometimes the server will be specially designed to cool CPU by liquid (liquid cooling).

Fujitsu Japanese brand embedded cooling technology

First, it must be recalled that most Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers still use traditional cooling technology including air-cooled and liquid-cooled, but with smart design with nesting vents. bee and control through Cool-safe® Advanced Thermal Design technology, device cooling efficiency is optimized and noise is reduced, including large CPU-sized machines like RX4770, blade server, or PRIMEQUEST super application server.

However, when realizing that the amount of data and applications of people increasingly exponentially expands and cooling problems for data centers has become a difficult problem, with its R&D efforts, Fujitsu has successfully launched a breakthrough cooling technology that is completely different from the traditional methods, which is the immersion cooling technology (Immersion cooling).

Fujitsu’s embedded cooling principle

Fujitsu’s research shows that this special liquid is completely non-toxic, non-conductive. Technicians can manipulate and disassemble, plug in devices, plug in network cables, … manually and even without protective gloves. With a closed circulating architecture that minimizes evaporation, after a full filling of the liquid, the embedded cooling system can be used for decades continuously without adding liquid.

The PRIMERGY server series integrates Intel® Xeon® chips just through a few simple options of integrating in the cooling tank, such as removing or placing commands to stop the fan (Main fan, power supply), adjust the location of hard drive installation, …

Practical images of devices Fujitsu runs embedded cooling technology

Conclude

Among the embedded cooling research units, Fujitsu is one of the pioneering companies offering finished products in the market. Although it is a very new technology, it may be in its infancy and there are some limitations, but compared to moving the data center to the North Pole, the technology still promises a high feasibility and flexibility. The realization of the embedded cooling system is a premise to build a new generation data center with outstanding advantages when saving power and cooling costs, safe for users and eco-friendly. . Because it is still based on the architecture of the current server and only through very small customizations that are compatible with this groundbreaking cooling system, it ensures device reuse, so basically is a new but cool cooling technology – both literally and figuratively – with servers or storage cabinets that people are used to. Clearly, Fujitsu’s research effort has brought a new concept of cooling, confirming the technological power of this Japanese IT firm.