Mission-critical technological innovation is, well, critical.

Having built around us a society entirely dependent on computing, from banking to healthcare and beyond, we find ourselves having to innovate new methods of powering this, and doing so in a way that is sustainable.

It is because of this, that DCD and CBRE are proud to present the Mission Critical Tech Award to Microsoft for their Cloud-Production Two-Phase Immersion Cooling Deployment.

On talking about the award, CBRE representative Theresa O'Brien told DCD, “innovation is one of our core pillars of success. I think it's a really exciting industry that we work in and we're constantly looking at ways to innovate and improve. So for us, it's really important that we're sponsoring other people to do that as well and encouraging that across the sector.”

In the case of Microsoft, they managed to deploy the world’s first public cloud production deployment using two-phase immersion cooling.

This enabled them to cool despite higher densities, disaggregated resources, and multi-die/chip systems in a way that lowers energy consumption (and cost) while increasing the life expectancy of the IT equipment.

This is a step forward, among the many that are being made, for liquid cooling. Microsoft’s approach uses a dielectric fluid. This is unlike water, in that it is safe for electronic equipment and boils at a monumentally lower temperature of 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

As a result, the servers cause the liquid to boil and carry the heat away from the computers. The evaporated liquid then condenses and flows back onto the immersed servers in a miniaturized version of the water cycle we learned in school.

It is innovations like this that will continue to help the data center industry reduce its carbon footprint, and lead all technological industries toward a sustainable future.