Microsoft announced yesterday that it is now immersing its servers in a special liquid at its data center on the banks of the Columbia River. The company said it allows for increased efficiency and less downtime.
How does the business do it? The technology giant said it uses a special liquid that boils at 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).) boiling point of water. This means that the heat generated by servers is quickly carried away by the fumes and in turn reduces the risk of overheating.
Engineers built a condenser in the tank’s lid so that vapors convert to liquid as soon as it touches the lid and falls back into the tank for reuse.
Microsoft said it was inspired to test this technology by observing cryptocurrency miners using liquid immersion to extract more from their mines. When the firm in Redmond tried it, the power consumption of servers reduced resource-intensive tasks like AI by 5% to 15%.
This is a more efficient way than evaluating the air conditioning, which consumes a lot of water. What’s more, the liquid immersion enables the company to pack more chips in a dense space and operate at higher power.
The technology giant is no stranger to running data servers under the fluid. In 2018, it submerged 864 servers with 27.6 petabytes of underwater storage near the Scottish coast. The servers are operated in a submarine-like tube without any on-site maintenance. Mircosoft said it could lower the failure rate to one-eighth compared to data centers across the country.
After experimenting with running a single server rack in a liquid immersion, the company wants to use multiple shelves. It is said that such systems can enable the firm to reconsider server designs for outputs with low latency and high performance that require minimal maintenance.
In the future, Microsoft may want to install these tanks in the middle of the city under a 5G tower to power various applications such as communications and self-driving cars.
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Published on April 7, 2021 – 08:06 UTC