Liquid-to-air cooling: enabling direct to chip liquid cooling in air-cooled facilities

Direct to chip / high density liquid cooling (HDLC) gains in importance in data centers as it provides a high potential to improve the efficiency of the cooling system. However, a typical HDLC setup requires a facility plumbing system directly in the IT white space. This may not be accepted, or may not make sense for each facility, especially if only a small portion of the installed equipment requires direct liquid cooling. For those cases, a solution is to dissipate the heat from the water into the data center air. Two possible solutions will be shown serving that purpose along with performance, efficiency and cost considerations.