[Our Innovations] OVHcloud details Hybrid Immersion Liquid Cooling technology ahead of Open Compute Platform summit

OVHcloud, the European cloud leader, shares details on its unique Hybrid Immersion Liquid Cooling technology ahead of the Open Compute Platform Summit. Operating 33 data centers across the globe, the Group has demonstrated over the years its relentless ability to innovate starting as early as 2003 with the very first servers benefiting from water cooling, now deployed at scale.

This year, OVHcloud R&D is proud to unveil the technical details of its Hybrid Immersion Liquid Cooling technology which combines the best of both worlds: water cooling and immersion cooling. Behind this new technological advance, OVHcloud aims at building data centers all over the world maintaining low PUE/WUE indexes even in harsh climatic zones.

Presented in a vertical library rack design, the new system can host up to 48 servers, each submerged in a dielectric fluid in its own independent tank. Components that heat the most, namely CPU and GPU, continue to benefit from direct to chip water cooling with an added convection coil for better cooling. The design footprint remains scalable and stackable and can provide high density compute while being deeply compatible with current OVHcloud data centers infrastructure.

With more than 16 patents application, this new solution stands out with a passive rack design that eliminates pumps and fans for zero rack cooling power consumption, and, incidentally, a silent DC. The global cooling infrastructure power is reduced at least by 20.7% at the DC level[1], reducing the OPEX. In harsh climatic zones, high power racks can operate with data center inlet temperatures of up to 45°C. It is also worth noting that some components are no longer required in the design of a data center further reducing CAPEX.

Amongst the details shared by OVHcloud R&D are metrics, with a PPUE[2] enhanced to 1.004 and a WUE[3] reduced to 0. Allowing for more compute power, while preserving footprint, this new design can adapt to areas with harsh climatic conditions and provides opportunities to valorize fatal heat. Its compute density makes it perfectly suited for uses cases like banking, medical and scientific research as well as gaming. A technical blog post recapping all the innovations can be read here.

[1]: Compared to OVHcloud water cooling solution.
[2]: Partial PUE is used instead of PUE. It is expected that the global PUE will improve in a similar approach which includes the power lost in the energy distribution system [More details about the PPUE and PUE here]. In line with its transparency commitments, OVHcloud will communicate PUE values upon gathering significant data on the long run on a specific location basis.
[3]: In areas where air ambient temperature is below 43 °C.