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Return on Investment

Asetek RackCDU D2C™ can provide immediate and measurable financial benefits to large and small data centers alike. The hot water, direct-to-chip, liquid cooling system can enable cooling energy savings up to 80% and density increases of 2.5x when compared to modern air cooled data centers. The savings typically seen are driven by OPEX savings resulting from lower data center power usage, and hence, lower overall electrical demand. The inefficiency of air compared to water for cooling results in a high cost of power for traditional air cooling.

The high energy cost for operating CRACs, CRAHs and cooling towers is addressed with Asetek liquid cooling. Power efficient liquid cooling replaces these components with low cost dry coolers. Because cooling of high wattage components is done with hot water, energy costs are further lowered.

The examples below summarize these benefits. Additionally, you can estimate the savings for your own data center by clicking on  “Calculate Your Savings”.

Payback in under 12 months

Figure 1 highlights a typical data center achieving payback of under twelve months by implementing RackCDU D2C across the facility. In addition, Figure 2 shows RackCDU D2C reducing the number of racks required and mitigating additional expense for a data center build-out as it expands by freeing up floor space. In these examples, the air cooled data center contains 100 42U racks with server load of 500w each, requiring 11.2GWh of cooling at a cost of $1.12M (@ 10cents/KWh). Chiefly from the reduction in CRAC power in moving to liquid cooling, the same compute load is cooled with 4.97GWh of cooling at a cost of $497K. This is over a 50% OPEX savings and savings of $623K ongoing annually with this transition to liquid cooling, freeing up capital for other investments such as additional servers.

     

Air Cooled Example

This very conservative example in the figure above (and the one following) highlight the details of where the cost benefits typically occur. The 3.6MW air cooled data center above has a PUE of 1.8, with 2.0MW actually going to IT power. CRACs and chillers are consuming 1.2MW to keep the data center running within thermal bounds.

Liquid Cooled Example

In moving the same data center to RackCDU D2C liquid cooling, low cost dry coolers replace the need for most of the CRAC and chiller capacity with only 60KW. CRAC and chillers consumption drops to 480KW for the cooling of equipment not cooled by RackCDU and IT sever power drops slightly due to the elimination of fans. The PUE of the liquid cooled data center with the same compute has also improved to 1.49. Additionally it is noted that almost 1.52MW is now available for re-use in building or district heating.

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