Splish splash, put the server in the bath
When might Immersive Liquid Cooling come to security?
Back in the day (I'm not sure which specific day), I worked on the UK Trident nuclear submarine programme. Not all of it. I did not have to drive the things, but I did a bunch of ASIC design, a bunch of debugging of other people's ASIC designs, a bunch of managing processes and a bunch of systems integration handover testing. Part of that time was spent aboard the dockside demonstrator attempting to get bits of the command and control system to work.
I distinctly remember waking up one time in the middle of a night-shift, laying on the floor underneath a rack full of equipment at around 2 or 3am in the demonstrator with my hands lodged up inside, trying to get at a cable stubbornly buried in the wiring loom, having been lulled off to sleep by the gentle sounds of chilled water rushing through the perforated steel floor beneath my head. At the time it felt quite serene - odd, given that we were building a platform capable of destroying the planet…
That was almost thirty years ago, so liquid cooling is not new.
Immersive Liquid Cooling is not the same thing.
Some time back, I put together a white paper and delivered a number of presentations that highlighted how we were missing the point on sustainability if we assumed that we could significantly impact the CO2 output of our buildings by focusing on the security equipment. The example calculations I included in my paper showed how we needed to be focusing on operational and infrastructural contributions rather than the security equipment itself, because the power consumption of that portion of a system - and therefore the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere as a result of electricity generation - was miniscule by comparison.
Getting the security personnel back and forth to site every day, bringing in the maintenance team when needed, providing all of these people with light to work by and making sure their environment was at a comfortable temperature was actually where the biggest environmental impact occurred, but if you could ignore all of that (which is a sizeable act of head burying) it was the core equipment - servers, storage, switches and workstations - and the active cooling systems they required that was the culprit for most of the CO2 output that might be attributed directly to security.
At a recent presentation I was confronted with stats that claimed that immersing our IT equipment could reduce the power consumption due to cooling by 90% - which is one heck of a claim - and when you add in the potential for zero water consumption, and virtually no noise output, it sounds as if Immersive Liquid Cooling of the core security equipment could virtually eliminate the infrastructural component of security CO2 and also enable that core equipment to be installed just about anywhere without all that annoying fan noise.
But as usual, the devil is swimming around in the detail.
In fairness, these are relatively early days in the evolution of immersive cooling, and there are almost certainly going to be use cases where it fits and those where it does not, but if everything works out and also the supply chain begins to fatten out then we probably ought to be thinking about what this means for the way we design and implement a wide range of compute facilities in future.
There have - in fact - already been questions raised by many (AWS amongst them) about the financial viability of pushing everything off-prem.
The public cloud - in the majority of applications - is really justified by a bunch of trade offs and economies of scale. If economics were not a factor, most organisations would probably prefer that they weren’t throwing their critical data over the fence into somebody else’s facility in the hope that it will be safe if they could somehow achieve the same functionality in-house. But it’s costly to build and maintain facilities - particularly when half of the floor area is taken up with HVAC and power handling infrastructure, all of which needs people to manage and maintain it.
If instead there were just another non-descript room down the corridor that people didn’t need to go into much, that made no noise and wasn’t excessively power hungry, that might be preferable for many companies. With processing power density continuing to follow the exponentiality of Moore’s Law, and the potential to make it work without needing rooms full of plant, megawatts of electricity and gazillions of gallons of water to keep it cool, perhaps we could see a reversal in parts of the cloud trend - particularly when the manufacturers start building high performance immersive liquid cooled appliances that were effectively plug and play. The only thing that could stop you in your tracks might be if your server room floor wasn’t capable of bearing a few extra tons of load.
Of course, for most consumers of SaaS and media (which is everyone walking down the street staring at their palm) the continued demand for more and more space in data centers is not going to go away, and quite possibly even when half the world is covered in anonymous grey buildings full of servers, that demand may push parts of that infrastructure down to the extremely local, with micro-DCs buried under our feet in the street or stuffed alongside the other plant rooms in every apartment building.
But whichever model of digital infrastructure might emerge, it’s obvious that being able to squish more compute into less space - particularly if the ratio of compute floor area to plant floor area can be tipped in favour of useful processors or storage - and so the allure of immersive cooling to help achieve precisely that really does look cool, if the stats are to be believed.
But what about in security?
Of course, all power reduction is good. All noise reduction is good. All reduced environmental impact is good. But not if it costs too much.
The distribution of density of power consumption in security systems does not really make it well suited to an efficiency measure like this right now. Much of the compute power of analytics is being pushed out to the cameras in many cases. That’s not really converting into a need to cool those cameras, but because they’re all PoE, the main place that heat is being generated from the power conversion process is at the switch. Individual switches stuck in an IDF somewhere aren’t economical to get creative with when it comes to cooling. A large surveillance system with dozens of switches all over a large development is chomping up a load of power as a whole, but each specific access switch is just spinning a couple of fans and minding its own business.
Ironically, a smaller system, where everything is physically close together - and the possibility of centralising the infrastructure offers more potential to club the cooling for servers, storage and switches, possibly bundling them into one chassis that might benefit from immersive cooling if such a chassis were available from a vendor in a format that made sense and was also integrator friendly - could be an easier fit.
But this is - as yet - an unpiped pipe dream…
Another big power eater in security is the control room, where workstations with chunky graphics cards not only push out a fair bit of hot air but also contribute negatively to the operational environment by being horribly loud. My preferred approach for a long time now has been to remove all of that hot, noisy hardware to a rack somewhere down the corridor and KVM/HDMI-over-fiber everything to the actual operating space, thereby making the room environment cool and serene, while also removing any potential for bored operator fingers to tinker with the computers.
It’s almost always a struggle to get people to accept this approach. They don’t want to have another room used up by infrastructure (particularly not security infrastructure). “Why can’t we just put the computers under the desks the way we always do?” they ask.
If there were some possibility of having a properly secured rack in the corner of the room that produced no heat and no noise but housed all of the workstation and video wall hardware (if there were any of that), maybe this would be another option to keep everyone happy? If the room has been designed reasonably ergonomically, there’s often a dead space at the front underneath the video wall. We put cupboards under there for storage quite often. A top loading immersive cooling rack could go there instead, convenient for all those video cables and also close by the operators.
Perhaps one of those ingenious control room furniture people could come up with a design for a combo-screen frame and immersive rack design to make it all nice and modular and off-the-shelf…
Of course, all of these possibilities lie away off in the future somewhere - somewhere beyond the mountains of practicality, affordability and acceptability that we’ve still got to clamber over before there’s any chances of it happening. It isn’t even as if mainstream data centers are adopting it wholesale quite yet, despite all the promise it could offer for sustainability and better PUE.
But I do feel that with the increasing appliance-ification of some parts of the industry and the inevitable economies of scale that might make building liquid-ready chassis something that everyone does as a matter of course, we could seem Immersive Liquid Cooling having an impact on the power hungry equipment we’re increasingly drawn to in professional large scale security solutions.
Immersive Liquid Cooling for the security team? Entertaining but probably not so practical.
If this is a topic you’d like to know more about, some of the key players right now have great resources to look at. I’m not advocating or promoting any of these organisations or their products, but these are some of the resources that I have found informative :
Schneider Electric White Paper of Liquid Cooling
Precision liquid cooling from Iceotope
To name but a few
At Securiosity, we’re looking at a lot of things that could shape the future of the Risk Management in society, not least the evolution of the industry itself and the way in which changing societies will place demands on that industry - whether it likes it or not.
The place of advanced technology both as a threat, as an opportunity and as a backdrop for the way we are able to live our lives is also an important topic for discussion, and one that we will continue to explore.
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