Fujitsu takes conservation prize for immersion cooling system

Fujitsu has received the Energy Conservation Grand Prize for 2018 in the Product and Business Model category of the Agency of Natural Resources and Energy Director-General's Awards for the first time.

The prize was awarded for the Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY Immersion Cooling System, which provides revolutionary energy savings, and recognises the Immersion Cooling System as not just an ICT device, but an advanced energy saving system that reduces power consumption for entire data centers.

Through its innovative products and energy-saving services, Fujitsu demonstrates its continued commitment to contributing to the digital transformation and reduced energy consumption of its customers, as well as to the mitigation of the impacts of climate change.

The Energy Conservation Grand Prize is part of an awards system intended to contribute to the achievement of an energy-saving society through measures including the expansion of energy-saving awareness and promoting the popularisation of energy saving products throughout Japan.

The awards scheme accomplishes this mission through its recognition of outstanding examples of energy-saving programs in addition to advanced, high-efficiency energy-saving products.

In recent years the growing prevalence of technologies such as IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) has contributed to concerns about the rise in energy consumption accompanying the continued dramatic increase in data volumes and processing loads handled by data centers.

Fujitsu developed the Immersion Cooling System by working to commercialise new cooling systems, aiming to provide a comprehensive energy-saving solution that takes into account both ICT devices and data center facilities as a unified whole.

Through such developments as supercomputers, the company has cultivated the i liquid cooling technology over many years.

This award recognises that this product contributes to energy savings while providing the high usability demanded in data center operations.

This product is a cooling system designed to efficiently and evenly cool servers by immersing them entirely in a cooling liquid.

The system provides significant energy savings because it doesn't disperse the heat generated by the servers into the room, which not only renders air conditioning unnecessary but also eliminates the need for cooling fans installed on the servers themselves.

Due to these factors, the system reduces the overall power consumption of a server system, including cooling equipment, by about 40% compared to air-cooled systems, contributing to a reduction in CO2 emissions.

Moreover, the system can more or less double server installation density in terms of installation space, also contributing to a reduced total cost of ownership.

Evaluated with a server system consisting of 96 PRIMERGY CX2560 M4 multi-node servers, comparing the power consumption of an air conditioning system and internal server fans against an immersion cooling version with the same configuration.

Fujitsu notes that because the reduction effect depends on the installation environment, it does not guarantee a power consumption reduction value in customer environments.