IBM Tuesday is to take the wraps off its eServer Rear Door Heat eXchanger, a cooling system for data centers. The water-cooled door helps to resolve data center hotspots and overall cooling issues, according to a company executive.

Previously codenamed "Cool Blue," the door fits onto IBM's eServer Enterprise rack. The four-inch thick door contains sealed tubes of chilled water, tapped from a data center's existing chilled water supply for its air conditioning system, according to Alex Yost, a director in IBM's eServer products division. The chilled water in the tubes helps to remove and dissipate the heat generated by the servers.

"Eighty to 90% of our customers already have chilled water to run their aircon systems," Yost said. "They have chilled water running around, under or above the data center today."

IBM has tested the water-cooled door against a fully loaded rack of 84 servers putting out 80,000 BTUs, according to Yost. Before deploying the door, standing in front of the rack is like "standing in front of a blow dryer," he said. "The difference using Cool Blue is unbelievable" since the door can cut server heat emissions by a maximum of 55%, while lowering energy costs by as much as 15%, Yost added.

As customers add more and more servers to their data centers to meet their growing performance needs, they're finding that their existing cooling systems are unable to cope with the strain of increased heat emissions. They have had only two choices to try and lower heat emissions, according to Yost. They either have had to put in expensive additional cooling capacity or install more racks into their data centers and split their servers between the racks.

Adding a new rack increases a data center's size by 16 square foot, Yost estimated, a potentially costly option when office space can be at a premium. IBM's new water-cooled door is only four inches thick, so it doesn't take up much space and lets IT managers fill up racks fully and not worry about heat emission, he said.

IBM has spent three years developing the door, representing primarily an investment of intellectual capital from IBM's thermal engineers, Yost said. In dollar terms, Big Blue has invested "in the hundreds of thousands of dollars" on the technology, he added.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.