What chassis immersion is, what hardware it takes, and what changes for your operations team. Written for an IT manager who has not seen it before.
Air is a poor conductor of heat. Every conventional data center fights that with fans in the servers, air handlers in the hall, chillers on the roof and often water in cooling towers. Chassis immersion skips the fight. Each server sits in a sealed chassis with a dielectric fluid in contact with the hot components. The fluid carries the heat out of the server, out of the rack and out of the building as a liquid. No fans, no air handling, no water consumed.
You may have seen photos of servers dropped into open tanks of fluid. That is tank immersion. Chassis immersion is different: the fluid stays inside each server's sealed enclosure, the racks are standard 19-inch, the servers slide in and out like any other, and a technician never touches open fluid. LiquidCool Solutions makes the chassis and the directed-flow system Loring uses.
| Loring-supplied servers | LiquidCool ZPServer chassis with standard server boards, CPUs, memory, storage and network cards inside. This is the preferred path. You specify the compute, Loring provides the chassis. |
|---|---|
| Your own hardware | Immersion-ready systems from a growing list of OEMs can be deployed in the same racks. Fans are removed or disabled and the board is fitted to a chassis. Ask before you buy. |
| Direct-to-chip | Cold-plate systems from major OEMs can be accommodated case by case at a higher operating cost, because they still need some air movement. |
| Not suitable | Spinning hard drives in open air, equipment that depends on its own fans, and anything that cannot be sealed. |
Power usage effectiveness is the usual way to compare. Air-cooled halls commonly run between 1.4 and 1.8. Immersion systems run close to 1.05 because the overhead is pumps instead of fans, chillers and towers. The difference is paid by you, every month, in the per-kilowatt rate.
Because the heat leaves the building as warm liquid, it can be used. Loring offers waste heat at up to 60 C to an industrial neighbor on the Loring Commerce Centre. For a tenant this is a sustainability line in an ESG report that most colocation providers cannot offer.
It is a non-conductive, non-toxic engineered fluid. It does not evaporate, does not conduct electricity, and is sealed inside the chassis.
Loring-supplied servers carry Loring's support. Tenant-supplied immersion-ready hardware carries the OEM warranty for immersion use. Converting a non-immersion server yourself usually voids the OEM warranty, which is why option one is preferred.
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