The “buy it in little pieces” nature of Open Systems is going to make reintroducing water back into the data center difficult, because manufactures will have to continue to produce systems that can be air cooled to maintain their economies of scale. It’s only when systems are purchased by the multi-rack full (with volume discounts to boot) do people go “Oh I wish we could do something different on the cooling front.” So what we, both customers and manufactures find ourselves in is a local minimum of mass produced lowest unit cost purchasing, where it’s going to take some energy (read investment) to realize the cooling optimizations that have been available to the industry for decades.

One possible way to move us out of current rut would be to define a “standard” water cooled cabinet. (Standard is in quotes because as we all know there is no such thing as a standard cabinet, just a set of specifications that most rack mounting systems can adapt to.) The idea would be define a water cooled rack, that all vendors could interface into. That way they can innovate in the electronics where they have domain expertise and leverage a common cooling infrastructure where they are not. Customers can deploy the racks and hook up water cooled systems as they become available. Who knows, collectively we might even be able to convince governments to subsidize standard water-cooled rack deployments if they can be shown to increase efficiency and reduce carbon.