Hold the line: liquid cooling’s division of labor

Direct liquid cooling (DLC, in cold plate or immersion form factors) boasts a performance advantage over air cooling, especially for high-wattage IT racks or individual processors. However, DLC comes with its own challenges. The conventional “line of demarcation” that divides the responsibilities of facilities and IT teams does not easily map to DLC equipment, and similar difficulties arise in designing systems for resiliency.

DLC requires facilities and IT teams to examine and (re)negotiate how they interact to attain their resiliency objectives. For the foreseeable future, several types of DLC systems will likely grow in adoption, frustrating industry efforts to establish a single, standardized model for implementation and operation. In private discussions with Uptime Intelligence, some data center operators revealed they had installed a few different approaches across their portfolio (or even within a single data center) to match the requirements of various liquid-cooled IT hardware. For colocation providers, this added complexity is also reflected in service-level agreements (SLAs) that are tailored to meet the specifics of the facility and individual tenant expectations relating to DLC.