Technology company Lenovo is working with the United Kingdom’s University of Birmingham on a new generation of data centre cooling solutions. Lenovo, which has headquarters in Beijing, China, has UK headquarters in Bartley Wood Business Park, Bartley Way Hook, UK. The company’s work with the University of Birmingham has seen an 83% saving in cooling energy usage when using its new water cooling solution compared to solely using air cooling. The new water-based cooling technology adds a mere 4.5kW of heat per rack, enhancing both the efficiency and capacity of Lenovo’s UK data centre and contributing to a significant cost saving. The technology, which took nine months to develop, sends water to the rear of a server. Heat is transferred from CPUs, dual in-line memory modules and on board components before it is flushed from a server. Water goes into the system at around 45°C and leaves around 10°C warmer. The University of Birmingham ultimately intends to use the technology to underpin its private research cloud and its ‘BlueBear’ HPC service.
“We work with businesses and universities across the globe to help them achieve operational efficiencies through IT,” explained DCG Director for Lenovo UK & Ireland, Guy England in a report published by GreenDataCenterNews.org. “This project has been a true collaboration between The University of Birmingham, OCF, Mellanox and Lenovo – giving us the ability to deploy innovative water-cooling technologies which deliver significant operational cost savings to the University. Following the initial success of this unique project, we are currently in discussions to expand the solution and grow the University’s current data centre.”
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