Top Liquid and Immersion Cooling Vendors for High-Density Racks
As rack densities rise and concern about the sustainability of data centers grows, data center managers need a way to not only cool their equipment but do so as efficiently as possible.
To efficiently cool racks of 20 kW or more, organizations are seriously investigating liquid cooling and immersion cooling.
Since liquid is a better conductor of heat than air and it can target specific server components, these innovative cooling technologies can dramatically reduce energy consumption and operating costs while allowing for more compute capacity in a smaller footprint.
The liquid cooling market is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 20% over the next several years, becoming a $7 billion industry by 2028.
There are currently many vendors on the market. If you are researching or planning to deploy liquid cooling, you need to familiarize yourself with the ones in a position to be industry leaders.
Here is an alphabetical list of the top liquid and immersion cooling vendors for high-density racks. Explore which vendors offer the best solution for your data center to narrow down your options.
Alfa Laval
- From the vendor: “Alfa Laval has extensive experience providing space-saving, highly efficient and innovative solutions for liquid cooling, including a comprehensive portfolio of compact brazed and fusion-bonded plate heat exchangers.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Aquila Group
- From the vendor: “The Aquarius warm water-cooled computing solution is built from the ground up to be the most reliable and economic solution for hyperconverged and HPC computing applications and can save nearly 50% on your data center’s overall power envelope.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Asetek
- From the vendor: “Asetek’s patented technology can reduce the energy data centers use for cooling by up to 50%. This is done by cooling processors directly instead of cooling the entire rack. In addition, we can recoup the energy spent cooling and turn waste hot water into electricity or provide 60 degree water for remote heating.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Asperitas
- From the vendor: “From full stack immersion cooling solutions for all enterprise workloads to mixed zones in your datacentre with high density compute needs and high stores nodes. All solutions can be warm water cooled and offer 100% of IT energy ready for reuse.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Chilldyne
- From the vendor: “The Chilldyne Cool-Flo system is a patented, direct-to-chip cooling system that delivers coolant at a low flow rate by utilizing a proprietary negative pressure pumping system. Chilldyne’s technologies were designed specifically to eliminate the risks associated with liquid cooling while keeping deployment costs low and reducing data center operating costs.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Coolcentric
- From the vendor: “The Coolcentric data center cooling solution can help you build or refurbish green energy efficient data centers which can increase compute power by 5 times, increase electrically active white space by 80%, and reduce energy costs by 90% when compared to competitive IT cooling solutions.”
- Useful links to learn more:
CoolIT Systems
- From the vendor: “DLC is a technology developed and patented by CoolIT Systems that uses warm liquid rather than cold air to dissipate heat from computer and server components. By capturing component heat in a liquid path, DLC allows for higher component performance and reliability, higher densities and decrease data center operating expenses through a decrease, or elimination of, chillers and CRACs.”
- Useful links to learn more:
DCX
- From the vendor: “Next Gen DLC system allows complete removal of power hungry HVAC systems with high global warming potential refrigerants. Liquid cooling provides alternative with 4-6 times greater density and energy consumption reduced by half.”
- Useful links to learn more:
DUG
- From the vendor: “With DUG Cool, the thermal qualities of the fluid mean that condensed water-cooling chillers can be used rather than refrigeration. This saves around 30% of total power usage. Removing all server fans, which aren’t needed in a fluid-immersion system, reduces power consumption by a further 20%. That’s a total saving of up to 51%.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Fujitsu
- From the vendor: “Up to 40% reduced power consumption. Up to 50% reduced data center space. Fluid protects ICT from extreme conditions, e.g. in high temperature, high humidity regions or manufacturing sites. Maintains processors and other parts at low temperatures by liquid cooling to reduce IT device failure rates.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Green Revolution Cooling
- From the vendor: “Our immersion cooling data center solutions future-proof your operation by reliably cooling up to 100 kW/rack – ensuring your infrastructure won’t be the bottleneck to your organization’s growth. With minimal site requirements, you can easily integrate high density racks into your existing data center or build a new one for a fraction of the cost.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Iceotope Technologies
- From the vendor: “Capturing close to 100% of the heat generated from every part of the system, our GPU-rich solutions offer extreme cooling performance and high-grade heat recovery which can be reused or sold as a utility. Precision delivery of dielectric coolant maximizes the cooling directly to the hotspots. This means there is no front-to-back air cooling, no bottom-to-top immersion constraints and no physical space wasted.”
- Useful links to learn more:
LiquidCool Solutions
- From the vendor: “Designed for conventional and modular data center use, LiquidCool servers integrate easily into existing compute environments and offer maximum scalability. One liquid cooled rack can replaced four air cooled racks within a data center, saving energy and space and eliminating capital and maintenance costs. No more complex air handling systems, ductwork, filters or CRAC units. Simple yet effective solutions.”
- Useful links to learn more:
LiquidStack
- From the vendor: “Ultra-compact, mission-critical immersion-cooled data center technology for hyperscale, cloud, colocation, and large enterprise data centers.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Motivair
- From the vendor: “Motivair’s End-to-End Cooling Solutions for High-Performance Computing, Data Centers & IT Infrastructure are an all-in-one liquid cooling solution, providing products and the post-sales services for the entire lifetime of your cooling infrastructure.”
- Useful links to learn more:
OptiCool Technologies
- From the vendor: “Reduce carbon footprint up to 90%, energy usage up to 90%, floor space up to 60%, noise levels down to 53 dBa, and operating costs up to 60%.”
- Useful links to learn more:
Submer
- From the vendor: “Our Solutions have been designed to maximize internal footprints and achieve industry-leading operational and energy efficiency through immersion cooling. The solutions are powered by Submer’s industry-leading immersion technology which empowers users to have high-density compute environments while simultaneously reducing their impact on their environment and increasing levels of sustainability.”
- Useful links to learn more:
ZutaCore
- From the vendor: “ZutaCore transforms the economics and performance of data centers, helping you increase processing power while using significantly less energy and space than conventional cooling systems. It's the advanced cooling solution for edge, 5G, AI and increasingly dense cloud compute environments.”
- Useful links to learn more:
How to Monitor and Manage High-Density Racks
If you are researching liquid cooling vendors, you are probably aware that high-density deployments are incredibly difficult to monitor and manage and maximizing uptime and efficiency is a constant struggle.
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software simplifies high density rack management and enables you to intelligently increase your density without risking downtime.
With DCIM software, you can:
- Identify and remediate hot spots
- Set thresholds and alerts on power and environmental conditions to know before you have a serious problem
- Automate power capacity planning to eliminate stranded capacity
- Get at-a-glance views of the health and capacity of all your sites
- Visually document all cabling infrastructure
Bringing It All Together
According to a 2020 survey, 16% of respondents currently use liquid cooling, 19% haven’t made a decision yet, and 29% have no familiarity with it.
Now is the time to learn about the different vendors, the different types of liquid cooling, and how they can support your high-density deployments. Browse their websites, their products, and any resources they offer like white papers and case studies to learn which vendors may be right for you.
If you haven’t already explored DCIM software, now is also the time to learn how second-generation DCIM can improve how you manage your high-density racks.