Asetek Retrofits Military Data Center With Liquid Cooling

Asetek, which has long been only known to enthusiasts for CPU and GPU cooling devices, is gaining traction in the data center market.

The company said that it has been contracted to retrofit a currently air-cooled data center of the Department of Defense with its RackCDU cooling technology. The DoD will pay about $2 million to Asetek, and hopes to cut its cooling cost by up to 50 percent.

Asetek originally announced the server cooling technology back in June of this year, following about 1.3 million unit shipments into the desktop and workstation market. "The Department of Defense has become very serious about improving data center efficiency, and they are seeking new approaches to address this mission-critical problem," said Andre Eriksen, Asetek’s CEO and founder.

The installation of the liquid cooling system will be handled by Johnson Controls Federal Systems, which is frequently contracted for data center retrofits by the DoD.

“Hot water direct-to-chip liquid-cooling is a powerful approach that can capture more than 80% of the heat generated by a data center and remove it from the building, where it can be cooled for free by ambient air or even reused for building heating and hot water. No power, whatsoever, goes in to actively chilling the water."

The company said that data center cooling accounts for roughly 5 percent of all electricity consumed by the United States federal government.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

See here for all of Wolfgang's Tom's IT Pro articles.

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