Feb. 5, 2003 -- Liebert Corp. has introduced a new line of refrigerant-based cooling products to manage "hot spots" of high-density equipment within data centers.
Liebert says its internal testing has found the new Liebert XD line to be 85 percent more efficient than water-based systems. Because the coolant's natural state is a gas, it eliminates the risk of fluid damage, which has been a concern to some data center managers weighing new product lines.
The products are the latest effort to address data center cooling challenges driven by growing adoption of ultra-thin blade servers, which can create heat loads that can't be easily managed by traditional approaches to air cooling.
"With these products, we’ve revolutionized data center cooling by enabling focused, high efficiency cooling of densities up to 500 watts per square foot," said Fred Stack, vice president of marketing for Liebert.
The XD products use a coolant known as R134a, an environmentally-friendly gas which has been widely used to replace CFCs (choroflourocarbons) in refrigerators and air conditioners.
Liebert says R134a is "new to data center applications." But it's not new to computing, having been used to cool high-performance gaming PCs, where practices such as overclocking can produce extreme heat loads. Companies including Chip-Con and Asetek have developed products for this purpose.
Like the PC products, the Liebert XD family uses a technique known as "phase change cooling." The coolant normally exists as a gas, but is compressed into a liquid form and then pumped through the Liebert XD units, where it vaporizes to a gas while absorbing the heat energy of the air. It is then returned to the pumping station where it is re-condensed to liquid.
The Liebert XD family of cooling solutions was unveiled last week at the International Air Conditioning, Heating, Refrigerating (AHR) Expo in Chicago..
Liebert Corporation is a division of Emerson Network Power, which provides a full spectrum of power solutions for telecommunications networks, data centers, health care and industrial facilities.