France: OVHcloud claims energy savings to be made from combined water and immersion cooling

According to new research by OVHcloud, hybrid liquid cooling technology has the power to reduce a data center's energy consumption by 20 percent when compared with using water cooling alone. 

The European cloud provider coupled up with the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne to test the cooling technology, first announced back in October 2022. In the experiment, Guillaume Polidori and Chadi Maalouf from the University, and Mohamad Hnayno, Ali Chehade, and Henryk Klaba from OVHcloud, tested the impact of three dielectric fluids (S5X, SmartCoolant and ThermaSafe R), the effect of the water circuit configuration, and the server power/profile. 

The cooling performance of the air- and liquid-cooled systems and the proposed solution was compared computationally at the server level; the proposed solution resulted in the energy consumed per server being reduced by at least 20% compared with the air-cooling system and 7% compared with the liquid-cooling system.

Results also showed that the proposed technique resulted in a reduction in the DC electrical power consumption by at least 20.7% compared to the liquid-cooling system.