UT08x11: Long Live Immersion Cooled Servers with Hypertec

Immersion Cooling requires specialized servers designed to operate submerged in a tank of coolant. But there are many benefits to this approach. In this episode of Utilizing Tech Sponsored by Soy, we continue our conversation from last week on Immersion Cooling.

This time with, uh, Patrick s Cantini of Hypertech Tech. Welcome to Utilizing Tech, the podcast about emerging technology from Tech Field Day, part of the Futurum Group. This season is presented by soy and focuses on AI at the edge and related technologies.

I'm your host, Stephen Foskett, organizer of the Tech Field Day events series. And joining me from Soy is my co-host, Janice Norski. Welcome to the show, Janice.

Thank you, Steven. It's always a pleasure to be back. Well, Janice, uh, in the last episode, you and I spoke to Doug, a company that is, uh, really pushing forward with immersion cooling, and we talked about many of the benefits of immersion cooling.

Uh, I guess catch us up on, on those benefits, and then we'll introduce our guest. That that would be great. Um, you're right there, there, there's a lot about immersion cooling nowadays, right?

I think 2025 is, it's a toggle between AI and just what can I liquid? Cool. How can I do it?

Um, and I'm excited to have Hypertech on the show today because we will take a deeper dive into the, the, the value pillars of liquid cool cooling overall, and how does it, how do all the parts and pieces come together to make it a reality and, and, you know, make some real innovation happen all the way from the core to the edge. So with that, I wanna turn it over to Patrick to introduce himself and, and give us a little more detail on your background. First, uh, guys, thank you so much for having me with you today.

Uh, for the folks, uh, on the other side of the screen, my name is Patrick Cini. I'm the global VP of Sales at, uh, Hypertech, who is the company for, uh, 20 plus years. So, and, uh, unfortunately or fortunately, a veteran of the IT industry.

Big background, uh, as you can hear, uh, I'm not from, uh, uh, I'm not from Texas. Uh, I'm a French, uh, guy from the Southa, France, this, and, uh, I've been, uh, in the IT industry for three plus decade, uh, working for GIBM. Uh, and, uh, I protect, like I said, for 20 years.

And, uh, for the Hyper Hypertech is a company who just celebrate his four years. We have a multiple segment in the four years of the company, but if we focus on the last one, they said the past 10 years was to grow our business where, uh, it manufacturer, global, global it, uh, provider. And, uh, on the manufacturing side, we do our own server storage, uh, PC laptop and so on and so forth.

Before we go in immersion coding, I, I think that that's the, the reason that it's interesting to speak with you after speaking with Doug, because where we talked there about a lot of the benefits. I guess many people are unfamiliar with immersion cooling. I think that's part of what we talked about, um, as the manufacturer of, of, of the servers.

I guess maybe first, uh, give us sort of a lay of the land. 'cause I know that you work closely with them and you also work closely with the companies that actually make, uh, like the tanks that things are. And, and so, so when a customer is approaching you about, uh, implementing advanced AI or some other kind of power and heat hungry, uh, demanding workload that needs immersion cooling, who are the players at that table?

So the players are multifold because you need to look that as a, as an infrastructure, as a, uh, as a manu, right? You go from the appetizer to, uh, the, uh, the main course to the cheese and, uh, and French, right? I need to bring cheese into it, to the cheese plate to, uh, the dessert.

And, uh, usually you have the people who know about immersion cooling and the people who don't, right? Who are interested for what they heard about the benefit to the less space, uh, 50% less power up to 50% or more of cost reduction on building a data center and, uh, so on and so forth. So the tank vendor are usually the one who promote emergent, right?

They're the, the base of the infrastructure of emergent cooling and, uh, is usually a tank or an, uh, uh, what you call, what they call A CDU, uh, cool the tank. And, uh, you don't need much more. There is no cheater except in a very, uh, specific case.

And that's the step one. Step two is imagine the tank as a pot in a kitchen, right? To make a plate of pasta, you need to fill that up with water.

That's the liquid vendor, right? Uh, Exxon, shell, uh, uh, BP Castrol and so on. And after that you need to put equipment, right?

And today, as you just mentioned, uh, Stephan, I don't need to say that as a surprise. AI is taking over the world, right? Uh, uh, I think you need to live under work to don't know that.

And, uh, AI on the training side, on the influence side, uh, on, uh, maybe a, a generative ai, you are to do some other workload, the power consumption of the asic, what we call A-C-P-U-A-G-P-U, the memory, and now the hard drive. So we are gonna come as quickly to Janis after that, right? Uh, have achieved level of temperature that air cool cannot do, right?

So now you are left with liquid cooling. And liquid cooling usually is differentiated in two bigger tasks, is the direct to chip that is fairly common now. And, uh, the immersion cooling, and there you have the single phase and the dual phase.

But we focus today solely on single phase for all the benefit without the problem. And, uh, that help us cool the system. So whatever amount, whatever amount of machine you want to, cool, right?

And I will give you some example later in a efficient, sustainable way, very important is sustainability aspect. We can maybe dive a bit more after that, uh, and, uh, help the customer realize that the benefit, I can put more machine in a particular, uh, uh, amount of square foot. I can reduce my power consumption like I just mentioned so and so forth.

And, uh, you add some switches the cable, and suddenly you have a complete infrastructure. Theistic I didn't mention, you still need to have a few dry cooler on the top of the roof to evacuate the, some of the, not the heat, but uh, the cooling of the cooling system. You cool the cooling system.

And, uh, you have the, in my opinion, the best solution the planet could sustain is not just at the equipment level, is the best system for the planet for the customer, or on a CapEx opex model is all bes and whistle bells and whistle. Yeah. No, Patrick, I think you did, um, just curious.

I mean, I agree with you. I think it is one of the most effective ways to cool technology, you know, for the planet. Um, tell us a little bit about where you see your solutions going, right?

Is it, is it just at the edge in, in some of these, you know, smaller containers, um, like the last episode we did with down under geo computing. Um, tell us a little bit more about where you're really deploying this, this hardware for liquid cooling. So I think today the most of the market for immersion cooling is at, uh, data center level, right?

Because, uh, most of the customer demand we have require high density, uh, large quantity. So is a pure data center play. But since day one, I believe that edge is the future.

On top of that, there is multiple reports from, uh, the garner or forest or whatever. Also, ai, the AI usage at the edge will be bigger than the AI usage in the data center by 23, right? So always keep that in your mind.

And the, the dug bug, uh, the, the dug, uh, uh, I think interview you did that, uh, I was part of it, but not for this one in particular, but for the system as a whole is a very good example of what a edge system could look like, right? Is rugged. You can drop that from an helicopter if you want.

You bring that from a truck, uh, is very simple to put in place, is all in one. You have the cooling at the back, you have the server at the front, and that's a pure edge play, right? And really in edge play, you have compute, you have storage, and you have ai, right?

Because the AI gonna pump some data until, uh, we can take it anymore and we need to store that somewhere. And, uh, we were the early, the only, today we are the only immersion board. That's mean.

The product we do have being designed solely for immersion. That's mean. You can't take the server and put it in a, in a rock.

It doesn't work. It works only in a tank with liquid. And we are the only one with a server, a storage server for immersion cooling.

And we choose solid by our partner for the greatness of their product, the capacity of their E one C one L or U three, for example, uh, in some of our product. And you make a great combo to be able to cater to all the needs of a customer. Y you, you talked there about, uh, a key phrase and that is immersion born.

And I think this came out as well in our previous conversation. You, you can't just take a server and stick it in a, in a coolant and expect it to work. It you, there's a lot of engineering that has to be done.

Now, it's not impossible engineering, it's something that we've been doing as an industry and that you've been approaching for, for a long time. But it is not the same as just dunking a a, a server in, in coolant. Uh, talk to us a little bit about what makes a design immersion born.

Oh, it says one of my favorite subjects, right? So we started immersion, uh, five years ago already. So we are not, and we do direct to chip since 2010.

So we are, uh, uh, liquid coing ion at Hypertech. The reason we went to, uh, uh, immersion, if, for the reason I gave you, and, uh, when you look at the server, our first implementation was with what people call today immer ready. That mean, uh, you take a air pool server and there is a bunch of step to do, uh, remove the heat sink, uh, change the thermal paste by your indium fo, take off the fan, modify the buyers, make sure that all the label are covered with an AC vehicle.

They will pull at the bottom of the tank, use some cable, all the cable from power cable to network cable, uh, need to be emergent, uh, emergent certified, or they gonna come brittle. And, uh, you, you push on them after three months, they break is something crazy. Uh, and it is, is feasible, right?

We have people today, uh, who do that, but it's not optimal. I, I'm gonna give you another analogy. I want the race right on, uh, on a Sunday race, the Sunday club, and, uh, I take my car, right?

Let's say I have a Chevy, whatever, and I put bigger, bigger tire and uh, uh, try to crank up a bit to the horsepower and, uh, make sure the car is cooling properly. And I go race, I guess what? I never win for one good reason.

There is a bunch of people on the track who have a poor GT ERS for example, who's been design to do. One thing is to race and the analogy forget the price side because it's not the case, right? But the analogy is our system, when they come to the customer and when we manufacture them, they're ready to be in emergent.

That mean the, the label are the, they are label who are made to be. They're from 3M by the way, uh, who are made to be in immer stain immersion. All the cable we use are certified for immersion.

The power supply we use are immersion cooling certified power supplier with all the change we applied to it, the chassis, who as you can imagine, you see a server is like pizza box, right? You have model board, the CPU, everything. The cha have been designed thermal thermally designed to be in immersion, to conduct the flow of liquid in immersion is always from a cold at the bottom and hot at the top.

And you recycle right in the perpetual movement. DOI have been designed to conduct the liquid in the most and faster, efficient way and so on and so forth. We have oversized people say, oh, immersion cooling is messy.

To avoid that, we built oversize end on the server where you grab the server, you don't put your own, your end in the oil you start with, right? Or you can still have a crane, you bring everything. But we sort about ease of use, ease of installation, ease of serviceability as a product to, one reason to be is being immersion coding.

And that's what make the big difference between the two. I can tell you that, uh, one of the main three vendor, you know, I call them DHL, Dell, HP Lenovo, I like the DHL, uh, acronym, one of the three, maybe the first one. Uh, do some, uh, AI server for immersion cooling.

They need to take via one another company who prepared that for him more than 150 step to prepare the system. Think about that for a sec, right? Who convert it, right?

150 step. And, uh, in our order, there is no step. The productive was designed to be like that, right?

So that's what make it, I hope I answer your question, Efan. That's why we make an immersion, what we call immersion born product. And, and, and that makes sense because I think that you, most it people are familiar with the airflow of a conventional server.

Yes. And the fact that there are baffles and there's front to back or back to front, there's, you know, there you, you need the, everything needs to work, right? In order to get that airflow working in order to cool that server.

And I think if you, if you think about it and wait, this server's gonna be in, in a, in a coolant, in a liquid, then all of those things are gonna be different. And you need to be engineered to be able to be effective in a, in a material that behaves differently than air. So for health and safety, the people, I don't know the, the, the regular folks, right?

And my wife, my kids, whatever, I don't think they ever been in a data center. When you go in the data center and you go between the hot tile in the back, you can't survive because it's too hot, right? The noise, it is at the level that everybody wear.

The noise canceling, uh, apparatus on the head when cooling the, not a lot of people talk about that. It's silent. Think about that for a sec.

There is no heat coming out of a tank non zero. Even if you open the tank, there is still no heat because the power of heat absorption from a liquid, right? It's not water, right?

It's a liquid is a hundred of times higher, I think is even thousands of times higher than, so you don't have all the, the, the, the problem that people in the data center had 20 years ago, data center, you have a proper of machine in Iraq, right? It was not like today where you have football field of, uh, rocks and equipment will become unsustainable in term of, uh, uh, environment. I appreciate the background.

Um, I, I always often forget about the sound myself after being in so many data centers. And it is true. Um, I don't think I've ever been in a data center with all things liquid colts.

I probably would've, uh, would've come to mind. But you talk about sustainability, right, Patrick? So, you know, that's obviously top of mind for everyone in the industries trying to figure out how do we save on energy and power.

Um, can you comment on just, just how much, uh, a particular customer maybe use an example of, I don't know, can probably talk about down under geo or even like someone like Suber. Um, how much more efficient are these solutions for those, you know, deploying these systems? Like how much energy are they saving?

Well, it, it is very simple, uh, for, uh, the folks on the other side of the screen. Like I said, we don't know. The efficiency of a data center is by what they call the POE is power usage efficiency that mean for kilowatt, for example of it, load that mean I have a server in consumer a thousand watt, right?

6. That mean if I put a thousand thousand watt server, I need 500 additional watt to prove the server. Is that the infrastructure and everything that mean the power consumption?

I'm gonna pay, you know, my electricity bill is on 1500 watts right now. Multiply that by thousands and you can have the good idea in. And what we did with Doug, right?

Uh, the Doug Nomad where you did the previous episode, dur, uh, done and GIO have also data center. Uh, and we made an announcement, we did, uh, an installation, uh, last year for one of the largest, uh, HPC deployment in immersion cooling ever done, right? Thousand and off nodes.

04. That mean my electricity bill would be on 1,003 watts or 1,005 watts. So I just saved 500 watts, right?

That's where when we talk about sustainability, the first one is, I'm gonna reduce my electricity bill. Electricity bill tremendously. I think sustainability doesn't stop right there.

Sustainability is well above and beyond, well, above and beyond the power consumption is what some people don't know that, uh, emergent cooking despite its name, doesn't use any water, right? So now there is another lingo with the w the water efficiency where, uh, is king with no one inside to be able to compete with that, right? Because it is zero water, that's it, nothing else.

And how much water does air cooled servers use and where do they use this water? That's a, that's a very interesting, they take the water out of the water supply, right? And the people in California, they are solely desperate with no water, water, but uh, uh, uh, mid-sized data center will use in water that completely evaporate of, uh, oil peak swimming pool size every two days.

To give you an idea, is thousands of home water usage. You know, so that's what you think sustainability come to play, right? And the server, when you go a bit further is all about style reduction, right?

I told you is, uh, you can reduce the size we have and the average of data center, not the most advanced whatever is a ratio of 10 x, we, we get 10 x less space. So space today, God doesn't give more land, right? He create all the land he could create, right?

And, uh, you don't use the space, you don't use water, you consume less power. The server we manufacture are what we call vanity free. There is the least amount of component as possible.

We, uh, even if when you do a, a retrofit to be emerge ready, you remove the fan and everything, earth three was designed, there is no fan, the chassis is barely a skeleton of a chassis. So that means less metal, less metal, meaning less stuff we bring outta overseas just means less traffic on the boat or by airplane, and you can peel the to the end, right? And that's why is the most sustainable it possible.

I just am fascinated by it. I think, you know, in my head, I can't stop thinking about the 150 steps and you guys have just built like, just a seamless, beautiful server. Um, I can't believe I actually look at your servers and think, wow, they're genuinely beautiful, but they work, uh, amazing, right?

And, um, you really have put so much thought into all the parts and the components to make it that Ferrari that's gonna win the race, right? Um, And by the way, is a ferri at the price of a Chevy. I just want to say that because people have a misconception.

The cost of liquid cool server is a few percent less than a cool server. So on top of that, you even save on, uh, on the, on the, on the ping, right? On the, on the price, sorry, on the CapEx.

Mm-hmm. Well, I would assume too, um, we didn't talk about this, but because you are dropping everything in the, in the cooling solution, do the parts and things run a lot longer? Do they, do they stay, you know, is it easier to, um, you know, I guess fix parts, if you will?

Things don't break down as easily, maybe if they're in the coincidence. So that's a a very interesting point, right? Uh, first when we develop the server, we start to choose vendor also.

And the same way we try to choose vendor who are sustainable at the core, right? So I mean, one of them, right? So, but, uh, uh, talking about the lifespan of the system, because there is no moving part because there is no dust and so on and so forth, the system can run much longer than regular system.

Liquid pool immersion cooling. There is one customer in particular in the oil and gas. So that, for example, is 10 years.

They do immersion cooling. And if you go to their main data center in Texas, in New South, they have system who are 10 years old, you know, and they're running fine except his old generation, right? His old technology, they still have a few of that.

There is the other company in gas who run for 10 plus years. And I was just talking to them months-ish ago, and we were talking about, uh, failure rate. And they say their failure rate is close to zero.

Think about that for a sec. Close to zero, right? Because the component are not stressed out.

One of the main reason of component dying is the heat. People don't mention that as much, but is have always a heat component in, in, except the manufacturing defect or whatever. But this, the heat and, uh, in, uh, in energy cooling, they're secure.

They're hindered for that, right? This means they're only in a very stable environment. The temperature is always the same.

And, uh, that's why we have this, uh, long life, uh, long lifespan on the hardware. Don't think that, uh, everybody's gonna run 10 years. Everybody want to change, right?

Every three to five years because technology advance and, uh, is more efficient and everything. But at the figure also because it's very, very, very low, it's interesting for the customer is, uh, less work at the data center. Uh, so when people say, oh yeah, it is a pain, uh, pooling, I'm gonna put liquid everywhere is never the case.

And you are not gonna go in a tank as much as you go in your regular work to start with, right? Thank you. I think, as Janice said, I think that's something that people don't think about, but heat is the enemy of reliability.

And, um, you know, systems, the thing that kills 'em is, you know, when they, when they experience thermal shocks or when the, um, you know, the, the dust gets in there and uh, and coat coats on, on, on the components and the components get too hot. It just doesn't happen. And, and I think that that is really an overlooked aspect of this.

So, you know, in summary, I guess if we want to kind of wrap it up, um, people should be looking at this. It's not more expensive, it's not more exotic, it's, it's, it's just less familiar. And you said that, uh, you know, it takes up less space, it makes the servers last longer.

Um, why, why is it that more people aren't using immersion cooling? Or is it that it is getting used and we just aren't aware of it? Why people didn't buy the first Tesla when, uh, they came out with the lotus, uh, retrofitted, right?

Because he was new, because he was disruptive. Because people say, I don't know about that, right? I'm used to have my regular car and previous to that is, Hey dude, I'm riding my horse extremely well.

I'm not afraid I'm gonna go in this crazy, uh, machine here, right? And is, is, is an evolution and immersion cooling is extremely disruptive for that because it's, uh, an entire parameter change. And I think that's one of the reason the people are do, are not doing it.

One of the other reason I will say is to be successful, you need to have a very strong ecosystem, right? Of people who do I told you right? The tank, the, the, the server, the liquid, the switches and everything.

And, uh, there is a, you know, you never get fired to buy a data and hp right? And, uh, they are not the most, uh, even if they do so right, as a retrofit on per project basis, need to sign a waiver that they don't give you a warranty or so on and so forth. People are say, Hey, okay, I need to buy from, uh, oh, who do I buy from?

Right? And, uh, we are not, uh, maybe with, with this podcast, we will, right? We're not as well known, uh, as, uh, our famous colleague here, but we, we start, right?

We, I think we are in a very good place when I see all the tech door, right? Uh, summer, uh, GRC, uh, uh, there is a, a bunch and there is more and more coming, I think IV is, is coming with one, is we want to solve this portion of the equation. You have plenty of 10 vendors or you have plenty of old vendor to choose from.

And now is to have is not to our advantage, but it will be to have more and more people as a server vendor doing emergence server, right? Because suddenly every people will have the choice, a large choice to choose from. I can tell you that in boff, pure, pure boff, uh, supplier X versus us, we always win when people take the time to test, right?

To see how this work and, uh, what we do for them. If you think about, uh, uh, people like Doug who deploy at large and plenty of other, we have larger project that cannot name them. We develop, you know, we talk about sustainability, Janice.

We develop packaging to ship in bulk, WhatsApp to do first when we ship on one single ski, we have, uh, a large amount, much larger amount of machine than any other one. The packaging we use is, uh, made out of a hundred percent recycled cardboard. But more importantly, we designed the packaging to be reusable.

Think about that, right? And the way we designed the packaging, because its identity, we made it where you go in phase when you install the system, if it's compute, you install what we call the, the tray after the node, you comes separately. And, uh, we cut the amount of time it takes to install thousands of node by days because of that sustainable, right?

Because it is more density. You don't need to have a, we just, uh, for a large illustration, we went from a six truck to three, so now 10 calculated the of 18 wheelers, PT three P truck, we don't need to be on the road. That's sustainability.

Well, excellent. And, and, and I really appreciate you, uh, sharing your passion for, uh, for this technology and, um, and, and helping, uh, you know, I do hope that our listeners will consider immersion cooling, uh, if only for the environmental, uh, sustainability benefits, the power utilization benefits, uh, even setting aside some of the other aspects and, and of course the long longevity as well. I mean, you know, every server every year that you can use a server a little bit longer is a, is another one you don't have to buy.

And I think that that's another, a huge benefit here. So sustainable. It's sustainable.

You don't need to take this over and god know what happened to it. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. Before we go, um, where can people continue the conversation and where will they be able to see Hypertech servers themselves?

So, uh, the next few event, we will be, uh, the defined one we will, uh, be at. So Supercomputing, uh, 2025, I think is in, uh, St. Luis.

I will above Las Vegas, but now we get St. Luis, I'm joking. com.

No, uh, no h and you will see all the information and, uh, you will see, uh, so Dime as a vendor or partner vendor, for example, uh, because, uh, there is a reason we choose them for our emergent product storage and for other regular product. And, uh, I think the best way to contact us or you just gimme a phone, Karen. Well, thank you so much.

And, and yes, we did speak on the last episode a little bit about the, the ways that SOY is, is making their storage, uh, compatible with Immersion cooling. Uh, Janice, I know that, uh, sustainability, longevity, these are, uh, hallmarks of, of soy as well. Um, and I really appreciate having you on the podcast this season.

Oh, it's been a pleasure. Yep. Alright.

Um, so thank you all for listening. Um, if you enjoyed this conversation, uh, please do subscribe. You'll find this podcast in your favorite podcast application.

You'll also find us on YouTube and on the new, uh, text Strong TV app on your TV or in your portable device. If you enjoyed this discussion, please do, uh, give us a, a rating, a review, uh, we'd love to hear from you as well. This podcast was brought to you by Soy.

This whole season was as well as, uh, tech Field Day, my own company, part of the Futurum Group. com. Include links to the companies that have, we've mentioned here as well, or you could find us on x Twitter, blue sky, and Mastodon as utilizing tech.

Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week.