Cold Plate Cooling

Cold plate cooling, also known as direct-to-chip cooling and liquid-to-chip cooling, is a type of liquid cooling that replaces the traditional air-cooled heat sink with a liquid-cooled heat sink. A heat sink is a device component that absorbs and dissipates heat.

In this form of cooling, a liquid-cooled cold plate is attached to the processors and transfers heat from the chip to the plate. Cold plate cooling only cools the processors, air cooling is still needed to cool the other device components.

What are the Benefits of Cold Plate Cooling?

The key benefits of cold plate cooling for high-density deployments include:

• Increased energy efficiency. Cold plate cooling can cool 60-70% of the heat generated by a server, dramatically reducing data center energy consumption. It can deliver a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of around 1.15.
• Reduced water consumption. Cold plate cooling eliminates the need for evaporative cooling, enabling a 90% reduction in water usage. Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) is an important metric for measuring data center sustainability.
• Reduced operating expenses. Cold plate cooling can reduce energy costs by requiring less mechanical air cooling.

Monitor and Manage High-Density Racks with DCIM Software

While high-density racks provide more compute capacity in a smaller space, managing and cooling them can be challenging.

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software offers a solution by simplifying high-density rack management and allowing for intelligently density increases without risking downtime.

With DCIM, you can easily find and fix hot spots, set thresholds and alerts on power and environmental conditions to know before you have a serious problem, automate power capacity planning to recover stranded capacity, get at-a-glance views of the health and capacity of all your sites, visually document all cabling infrastructure, and more.

Want to see how Sunbird’s second-generation DCIM software makes it easy for you to manage a high-density data center? Get your free test drive now!