Leading lubricant brand Castrol has revealed that its headquarters in the UK will soon host a new centre for testing and developing technology to provide cooling for data centres through immersion. The new centre will share a site with parent company BP’s upcoming battery-testing laboratory.
The new centre builds upon an agreement between Castrol and Submer that was reached earlier in the year. Submer specializes in immersion cooling solutions for data centres, which it claims can reduce energy usage substantially due to the reduced need for cooling fans and air conditioning.
Castrol, of course, has extensive experience in developing coolant fluids for various applications, and it will leverage this to develop new fluids for immersion cooling at the centre. Space will also be used to install adapted versions of Submer’s MicroPod and SmartPod tank systems, which partners and customers will be able to use to validate the immersion-cooling technology with different fluids and server equipment. The centre will also experiment with methods of reusing the heat captured from data centres.
The technology vice president for industrial products and advanced mobility at BP, Rebecca Yates, said about the new technology:
“Immersion-cooled data centres could bring huge gains in performance and big reductions in energy wasted in cooling. Together, Submer and Castrol aim to deliver sustainable solutions as demand for computer power continues to surge.”
Submer CEO and co-founder Daniel Pope, meanwhile, said that the investment by Castrol in its systems represented a further step in the companies’ shared mission of progressing the IT sector’s adoption of immersion cooling.
