Impacts of local cooling technologies on air cooled data center server performance: Test data analysis of Heatsink, Direct Liquid Cooling and passive 2-Phase Enhanced Air Cooling based on Loop Heat Pipe

Data Centers are becoming increasingly more dense and expensive to cool. Before bringing tons of water to the servers with Centralized Liquid Cooling or Immersion systems, could local Liquid Enhanced Air Cooling solutions help? Based upon experimental test data from a retrofit of Intel HNS2600KP servers placed in an air cooled Data Center, this paper presents a comparative analysis of local cooling solutions presently available on the market: actual Heatsink, Direct Liquid Cooling and passive 2-Phase Enhanced Air Cooling solutions based on Loop Heat Pipes. In parallel, laboratory test data analysis also gives an insight to Data Center integrators and operators on the power density performances that can be further reached.