[soggybread]

I'm surprised. They mention that cooling is only going to get worse and that fans consume a lot of power, should liquid cooling not be something to look at? Maybe they did and found it either unnecessary or improbable to do at a colo depending on how many servers they have at the data center it might not be worthwhile but if they have 10 or 20 servers surely it would be worth while no?

[eastdakota]

If you're building your own facility, there's a lot of things you can do with design. In our case, these servers need to go into other people's facilities (e.g., ISPs around the world) so we need to live within their constraints. Things like liquid cooling either wouldn't be possible or would add significant complexity to install and maintain.

[bluedino]

You need tanks, plumbing, pumps, coolant...if the datacenter doesn't have it available it's not a small undertaking.

Example: https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/liquid-cooling#solut...

[amluto]

There are at least a couple vendors with self-contained liquid cooling systems, kind of like the “all-in-one” systems available for desktop and gaming use. I don’t know how effective they are.

[soggybread]

You're right and while it might take up valuable rack space I would imagine there are some rack-based solutions that have most of the stuff included so that you don't have to rely on the dc providing it, pretty sure ServeTheHome has done a couple reports on them

[aftbit]

AIUI this is just starting to take off. Look at Supermicro's 2U4N and 1U2N offerings, which need to use liquid cooling to reach that density. I know Alibaba has been doing vertical mounted servers in a non-conductive oil bath for a while. I bet their generation 13 servers have liquid cooling.

[yaxe1]

My guess is liquid cooling isn't reliable enough. Something is going to leak eventually.