The biggest lubricant company in Japan, ENEOS, has joined the ElectroSafe Fluid Partner Program that was launched by GRC at the end of last year.
Shortly after the programme’s launch, Shell was the first lubricant company to sign up. The programme aims to broaden the availability of environmentally friendly coolant products that have been systematically tested in the immersion tanks at GRC.
GRC’s chief product officer, Ben Smith, said that his company had worked with ENEOS for a number of years already and welcomed the prospect of:
“…expanding and strengthening our relationship through their participation in GRC’s ElectroSafe Fluid Partner Program. ENEOS and GRC will be able to offer additional fluid options to data centers globally while also continuing to work together to improve existing fluids and develop new formulations that improve operational uptime and efficiency.”
Immersion cooling is a more energy-efficient alternative to air cooling, which often requires server rooms to be air conditioned. It involves immersing IT equipment in liquid coolant and outputting waste heat as warm water, so it can be potentially reused, such as to heat office space in the same building. It also has the advantage of enabling greater rack power densities to be achieved.
Nevertheless, despite its apparent benefits, many data centres have been slow to adopt immersion cooling due to the cost of retrofitting the technology into existing centres and the design changes that are needed to support it, but this may change as companies strive to reduce the carbon footprint of their data operations.
