Over at the Dell Blog, James Mo writes that the company developed its new Triton liquid cooling technology for the hyperscale needs of eBay. With Triton, Dell is the first major vendor to safely bring facility water directly in each server sled to cool the CPU.
“Because water can transport heat 25 times more efficiently than air, ‘Triton’ can run high performing components faster and more efficiently than traditional air-cooled systems. Its ability to sub-cool the processor and operate at higher frequencies means that ‘Triton’ can deliver up to 59% greater performance than the popular Intel Xeon processor E5-2680v4 for similar costs. The combination of ‘Triton’ and a customized 200W Intel Xeon processor E5 v4 can also provide double digit performance increases over the highest performing Intel Xeon processor on the market today.”
We worked closely with Dell to develop a customized server solution which utilizes an innovative approach of liquid cooling 200W CPUs to deliver large performance and efficiency gains,” said Nick Whyte, Vice President, Fellow Search Technology, eBay. “By collaborating with Dell and Intel our search servers achieved an increase of 70% in throughput (QPS – queries per second) with the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2679 v4 versus the previous generation Intel Xeon processor E5-2680 v3 in the ‘Triton’ proof of concept.”
According to Mo, Dell is currently evaluating a “closed loop” version of Triton that offers the same liquid cooling technology and CPU support, but removes the need for datacenters to have facility water at the rack. This has the potential to bring liquid cooling to an even broader set of scale-out customers.
