Data center operators adding direct-to-plate cooling have been saving on energy costs by reducing the number of bulk fans needed to keep the high-value central processing and graphics processing units at the front of the server racks cool. Now, one company says its back-of-rack air mover is helping to solve a problem that’s arisen from data centers switching to liquid cooling.

The savings from reducing fan count can be substantial, because the fans consume about 15% of the energy flowing into data centers, Carl Schlachte, CEO of cooling technology company Ventiva, told Facilities Dive.  

But fewer front-of-rack fans can leave the lower-value but still essential back-of-rack components like network interface and boot-optimized storage solution cards susceptible to overheating, throttling server performance, Schlachte said. So he’s betting that data center operators will be open to making upgrades to get Ventiva’s ionic air moving engines into their servers to keep those back-of-rack components cool to improve their performance and increase uptime. 

“There’s a path for the enterprise OEMs [server manufacturers] to come to the facilities manager and go, ‘We’re going to do an off-cycle upgrade [and replace] this BOSS server with a [cooling-enhanced] BOSS server,’” he said. “‘No hit to you in terms of bottom line, and you're going to get 15% more uptime. Would you let us do an off-cycle upgrade?’ The answer almost universally is yes, because uptime is revenue on both sides of the ledger.”

Ventiva launched 15 years ago as Thorn Micro Technologies to leverage the air-moving capacity of positively charged ions when they pass from a charged wire to a collector in a process called electrohydrodynamic flow.  

“The principle has been around, like, 300 years,” Schlachte said. “People noticed that when they charged up things — static electricity and those kinds of things — they felt this little breeze coming off of it.”

Ventiva’s air mover is a fraction of the size of a typical fan that’s built into a server and has no moving parts. It works by generating a plasma field around an electrified wire. The plasma strips positively charged ions from the oxygen and nitrogen that’s in the surrounding air and generates air flow when the ions cross a gap between the wire and a negatively charged collector. 

“It doesn’t take much air movement” to cool small computer components, Schlachte said. “It takes one or two [cubic feet per minute] and you can get air movement between DIMMs on the rack and everything starts to get better almost immediately, because the system was throttling due to overheating at the back.” DIMMs stands for the dual in-line memory module that plugs into a server to hold computer memory. 

For operators that want to make the upgrade, the process involves having server technicians replace the BOSS or NIC cards or the DIMMs with versions of the cards that have the air mover built in. As these enhanced components operate at lower temperatures, server performance should improve. And since the bulk fans are gone, performance is improved even as energy costs go down, Schlachte said.  

“The server runs some double-digit percentage better, because it’s got its own cooling built into it,” he said. 

The company is sending its first shipments out next year in laptops and mini PCs, like Nook devices, and then into data centers. For the balance of this year, it’s qualifying the air movers so the OEMs can accept them into their servers. 

“We’ve got cards running right now,” he said. “We’re doing thermal simulations…. So, facilities managers should start seeing calls from people here pretty soon, saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got an answer for you that looks like more uptime. Just swap Card A with Card B.’”