eBay’s Liquid Cooled Billion-transactions-a-day Data Center With Dell and Intel

Water transports heat 25 times more efficiently than air, but water and electronics don’t mix – hence the prevalence of air cooling in the data center. It’s controlling water’s cooling capability without destroying servers and shutting down systems that’s bedeviled data center services providers, IT managers and technology vendors for decades.

Now, in a proof-of-concept project six years in the making, #eBay, #Dell and #Intel, say they’ve made major strides in channeling the potential of liquid cooling – enabling greater processing power at a fraction of normal power consumption and within smaller a smaller footprint – that could have implications for the hyperscale and web services market.

eBay, of course, defines “at scale” in ecommerce. The world’s largest online marketplace handles more than 1 billion transactions per day and has nearly 95 million active users globally.

In setting out its data center objectives – packing more power at lower cost – eBay made the decision to commit to water cooling in partnership with Dell and Intel. Key to the project is the anti-leakage provisions engineered into the liquid cooling capabilities of Triton (the messenger of the sea in Greek mythology), Dell’s rack-scale infrastructure for hyperscale implementations, combined with a customized 200W Intel Xeon processor E5 v4, which provides significant performance increases over the highest performing Intel Xeon processor on the market today – and generates a lot of heat. The result: according to Dell, Triton’s ability to sub-cool the processor and operate at higher frequencies means it can deliver for similar costs nearly 60 percent greater performance than Intel’s Xeon E5-2680 v4, according to Dell. Compared with average air-cooled data centers, Triton uses 97 percent less cooling power and has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.02 to 1.03.

http://www.enterprisetech.com/2016/06/29/ebays-billion-daily-transactions-cooled-water/