A new data center liquid cooling solution developed by Iceotope Technologies in collaboration with Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) made its debut at the HPE Discover event in Las Vegas. The tech, dubbed Ku:I Data Center, boasts energy efficiency increases of up to 30%, according to laboratory tests.

The three companies measured the power consumption of a sample IT environment cooled with traditional air-based cooling techniques, and then measured energy use with precision immersion liquid cooling. Those lab tests showed Iceotope's immersion cooled system allowed for a 4% increase in performance with zero throttling in hotter environments at server level and used 1-kilowatt less energy at rack level when compared to a traditional air-cooled system.

According to Iceotope, this represents a 5% energy savings in terms of IT infrastructure and a 30% energy savings based on the average cooling power usage effectiveness for data centers using liquid cooling systems compared to those using traditional air cooling.

Liquid cooling is by no means a nascent topic in the realm of data center sustainability. Intel last month announced plans to share the industry’s first open intellectual property immersion liquid cooling tech and its reference design.

The company hopes the free availability of this complex tech will spark broader industry adoption of immersion cooling while accelerating “the introduction of Intel solutions in response to the trend of increasing data center power density to enhance operational efficiency.”

Intel plans to develop the initial immersion cooling solution and design proof of concept in collaboration with Intel Taiwan “and across the Taiwanese ecosystem in a phased approach, with plans to scale out globally,” according to the company.

According to Dell'Oro analyst Lucas Beran, immersion cooling will become “a prominent way to deal with [thermal management]” within three to five years, he told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

However, adoption in the near- to medium-term future will likely begin in hybrid environments that use both traditional air-based cooling and immersion cooling, he added.

And fear of change across the data center industry is a potential hurdle that immersion cooling will need to overcome. “I think people in the data center industry let that fear slow down innovation — not stop it — but prevent us from enacting change faster,” Beran said.