There are several known benefits of choosing liquid cooling over traditional air cooling including energy savings. Capital cost, however, is viewed as a common obstacle.
Schneider Electric’s preliminary analysis of our chassis-level precision immersion solution versus a traditional air-cooled solution speaks for itself.
Figure 1 shows the results of the CapEx analysis overall. It demonstrates that for like densities (10kW/rack), the cost of an air-cooled and liquid-cooled data centre are roughly the same. But as Schneider explain in their white paper, liquid cooling also enables compaction of the IT, and with compaction, there is an opportunity for CapEx savings.
When compared to the traditional data centre at 10kW/rack, a 2x compaction (20 kW/rack) results in a first cost savings of 10%. When 4x compaction is assumed (40 kW/rack), savings goes up to 14%.
