COLUMBUS, Ohio - With energy costs rising, reducing the energy consumption of data center cooling systems is becoming as critical as maintaining reliable cooling for high-density IT environments. With that in mind, Emerson Network Power has introduced the Liebert XDS server cooling system, a new direct server cooling technology designed to provide a flexible, reliable, and energy-efficient cooling solution for high-density IT systems.

Available in North America, Central and Latin America, the Liebert XDS brings refrigerant-based cooling directly to the server with a technology that eliminates both cooling system and server fans. The result, said the company, is a highly energy-efficient cooling system that exceeds the performance of the best cooling solutions on the market.

“The Liebert XDS is a major step forward in the evolution of data center cooling. Cooling is now positioned at the most efficient spot - at the server that generates the heat,” said Steve Madara, vice president and general manager of the Liebert precision cooling business of Emerson Network Power in North America. “Heat is stopped at the source, so no additional heat is expelled to the room from the rack. This significantly minimizes the energy required for data center cooling. It has the possibility to reduce the total data center cooling energy to less than the energy consumed by the server fans that are removed.

“As a result, the Liebert XDS has the potential to fundamentally simplify the design of data centers,” Madara said. “With the elimination of the fans, data center managers no longer need to worry about managing airflow in the data center or employing a hot-aisle/cold-aisle configuration.”

The Liebert XDS consists of a standard-sized IT rack equipped with patent-pending cold plate server cooling technology from Emerson’s technology partner, Clustered Systems. The cooling plates are configured to use refrigerant supplied by a Liebert XDP refrigerant pumping unit.

Heat generated by the server is transferred through heat risers to the server housing, then through the thermal interface material lining the cover, and finally transferred to a cooling plate, which uses refrigerant-filled microchannel tubing to absorb the heat, eliminating the need to expel air from the rack and into the data center. The system cools a full range of rack capacities up to 40 kW and saves a projected 80 percent over room-based cooling system costs.

The company noted that during recent independent testing by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Liebert XDS was named the most energy-efficient solution tested, effectively winning the Chill-Off 2 event. Organized by Data Center Pulse and sponsored by Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the event tested the energy efficiency of vendor cooling products in the same data center environment.

For more information, visit www.liebert.com.

Publication date:11/08/2010