Lubricant brand Castrol has announced that it will open a new facility for the development and testing of data centre immersion cooling at its global headquarters in the UK.
The BP-owned brand had previously announced a partnership with immersion cooling system firm Submer.
The facility will be established at Castrol’s HQ in Pangbourne, Berkshire, which employs 400 people.
It will be funded by BP, which has also announced £50m of investment to set up a new electric vehicle battery test centre and analytical laboratory at the facility.
Immersion cooling is not a new technology, but the centre will aim to test new cooling liquids and server equipment to accelerate take-up.
It uses specially formulated heat conducting and dielectric or insulating fluids, which cool vital components of server equipment when it is submerged.
The servers are cooled as the heat is transferred to the liquid – with the energy potentially being used again.
According to Submer, immersion technology has a number of advantages over traditional fan and air-based cooling systems.
Firstly, it supports new generations of high-density chips that Submer says can no longer be effectively using air-based methods.
Immersion is also more sustainable, using less energy and space than traditional techniques.
Heat can be redeployed to other facilities in the area
By applying additional heat recovery and redeployment technology, the transferred heat can also be used to provide hot water to businesses located nearby.
Rebecca Yates, technology vice-president of advanced mobility and industrial products at BP, said that using immersion cooling could greatly improve the overall performance of data centres, while reducing the amount of energy wasted.
She said that Castrol and Submer were looking to develop more sustainable solutions as the demand for data and computational power continues to grow.
Daniel Pope, co-founder and CEO of Submer, added that the project represented the next stage in a joint mission with Castrol to accelerate take-up of immersion cooling technologies within the IT sector.
Elsewhere, the French cloud operator OVHcloud has also revealed details of its own hybrid liquid cooling system, which uses a combination of water and dielectric immersion fluid.
Servers are submerged in vertical tanks filled with the dielectric fluid, while the hottest parts are further cooled by a separate direct-to-chip water cooling system.
Today’s news was brought to you by TD SYNNEX – the UK’s number one solutions distributor.
