Liquid Cooling Firm CoolIT Secures Data Center Cooling Patents

Canadian vendor CoolIT Systems announced it has secured three patents for data center cooling technologies, two of them for direct liquid cooling and one for overall controls of data center cooling systems.

CoolIT specializes in direct liquid cooling, where liquid coolant is brought directly to server processors. While more energy efficient than traditional air-based cooling, the approach has not enjoyed widespread popularity. Although there are some signs of resurgent interest.

Direct liquid cooling works well for extreme power densities, but densities in data centers have not risen as quickly as they were expected to several years ago. This and a handful of other factors have made direct liquid cooling a niche technology, used primarily in high-performance computing facilities.

Its three new patents bring Calgary-based CoolIT’s patent portfolio to total of 50.

One of the three addresses one of the biggest barriers to adoption of direct liquid cooling: the fear of liquid leaking and damaging expensive IT gear. The patent is for a sensor system that notifies any server diagnostic monitoring system of moisture or condensation inside a server.

Another patent protects CoolIT’s intellectual property around a method of managing fluid flow through micro channels on a cold plate for maximum efficiency. The patent covers the vendor’s approach to minimizing pressure drop and minimizing the size of the cold plate, both of which serve to reduce the amount of pumping power the cooling system requires.

The third patent covers a method of mapping and monitoring temperature distribution in a data center automatically. Falling more into the data center infrastructure management category, the method is meant to give data center operators a way to optimize cooling resources at a granular level.