Shell Lubricants has introduced a range of single-phase immersion cooling fluids to keep computer components cool in an efficient way while helping to cut energy consumption and lower carbon dioxide emissions especially in energy-intensive facilities such as data centres.
Immersion cooling is a way of cooling IT hardware, including whole servers, by immersing them in a dielectric (electrically non-conductive) fluid. In single-phase immersion cooling, the fluid stays as a liquid without changing phase.
Compared to traditional air cooling, single-phase immersion cooling can reduce cost of ownership by up to a third while helping in reducing electricity consumption by up to nearly half. Moreover, single-phase immersion cooling can boost processor performance by up to 40%.
Commenting on the new product, Mansi Tripathy, Vice President, Shell Lubricants for Asia Pacific, said, “We believe Shell’s immersion cooling technology is an essential piece of the puzzle in tackling data centre energy use that will be key to helping customers deliver on their sustainability commitments. Made from natural gas using Shell’s Gas-To-Liquids (GTL) process, Shell Immersion Cooling Fluids are designed to maximise the energy efficiency and performance of data servers and information technology (IT) components.”
Shell’s GTL products made from natural gas are synthetic fluids. The colourless and odourless fluids are inherently biodegradable to different extents, stable and provide excellent performance and material compatibility.
With the growing use of data-intensive technologies, such as the Internet, cloud and edge computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics, demand for server space is increasing rapidly, placing greater demand on global data centres. Data centres account for about 1% of global electricity consumption, with more than a third of this power used for cooling electrical components.
Shell is an early adopter of the immersion cooling technology and recently upgraded its High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster at Skybox, a U.S.-based data centre, which already operates on 100% renewable power purchased from Shell Energy, to demonstrate a fully integrated, optimised, and scalable solution for its customers.
The immersion cooling solution, implemented in Shell’s HPC cluster in Amsterdam, is helping Shell deliver high-end processing power while reducing its energy consumption within a T-Systems managed data centre.
Shell Lubricants is also looking to work with key players in the data centre ecosystem in Asia – such as tank Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators, data centre owners and co-locators – for proof-of-concepts with its immersion cooling fluids to meet next generation computing requirements.
For more information: www.shell.com/immersion
