Art of JITs

For people living in the northern regions facing the oncoming, the concept of “free cooling in any climate” might not sound too appealing. But the concept resonates with at least one group of people: IT professionals who are faced with keeping their hard, overworked data center servers from overheating. For these IT professionals, the recent news that Iceotope, a company that offers just such a “free cooling” promise for data centers, has a new lease on life is good news indeed. The assets of Iceotope, an English based company behind a scalable, modular liquid cooling platform for data centers, have been purchased by a consortium that includes the original engineering team for the technology. Raising funds for the seven-figure investment to acquire the company’s technology and intellectual property was led by the original inventor and newly appointed CTO, Peter Hopton. The VC-backed Iceotope entered administration in October of 2011. Hopton was not part of the management team when the company entered into administration. Iceotope claims its patented technology has the ability to dramatically reduce the power consumption in data centers by cooling servers in their server racks at the source of the heat deriving from the component level. The electronic components are sealed inside large heat-pipes holding an ultra-convective fluid. All this generated heat can then be captured and effectively removed without heating up the surrounding data center environment. According to the company, data centers housing Iceotope servers can save about 20 percent of their power consumption at the server level and save about 97 percent of the costs associated with cooling power, for an overall cost reduction of more than 50 percent for the typical data center.