Incoling way As CEO Helena Samodurova sees it, the IT world is facing two major crises: the energy crisis and the supply chain crisis. For IT teams, meeting a climate-friendly energy budget is becoming a challenge, especially when dealing with older computer hardware. At the same time, it’s getting harder to find improved, less power-hungry machines because of shipping backlogs and hardware running faster with efficiency limits.
Motivated to solve the dual dilemmas — a lofty goal, to be sure — Samodurova co-founded Incoling, which focuses on efficiency in data centers. Incoling, which is installing in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt, has designed a custom-built server with a proprietary cooling system that allows for superior thermal management, allowing the server to achieve higher levels of efficiency.
“Our design and cooling allows us to unleash the full potential of today’s technologies,” Samodurova told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “With our technology, we can increase performance on non-scalable and scalable tasks by accelerating existing hardware and saving on power consumption.”
Samodurova began developing the inking technology in 2018 with the company’s co-founder, Rudy Verweij. The two met during a hackathon at the Hi-Tech Campus, a technology hub and R&D ecosystem on the southern edge of the Dutch city of Eindhoven.
After joining CERN in Switzerland – Samodurova facilitated connections through her work at HighTechXL, an incubator that previously commercialized CERN technologies – Samodurova and Verwijk designed prototype server hardware. Their server uses a dual-stage cooling system with a cooler specifically designed for extreme temperatures and conditions, which Samodurova says allows it to achieve some of the fastest processor speeds of servers on the market.
A diagram of how an Ecoling phase change cooling system works. Image Credits: Getting inside
Ecoling’s secret sauce, if you will, is the aforementioned cooling design and control. Samodurova said the system can quickly respond to fluctuating thermal loads to ensure the server’s processor stays within a safe temperature range. “When we enter a new market – cooling and computing – we don’t really have direct competition,” Samodurova said. “Refrigeration companies focus on cooling and server manufacturers only on the end server, but we take the best of both worlds and combine them in the final customized solution to ensure that each major component works at its maximum capacity and thus increases the end result beyond the current market standard.
Certainly, Ecoling’s mission is important. Data centers are estimated to consume about 3% of global electricity supply and account for about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Refrigeration costs can be close to 2 billion dollars per year. While traditional data centers use less power than ever before, the need for computing to run AI-powered applications and host the growing public cloud threatens to derail progress.
Samodurova is reluctant to say much about how Encoling handles its server efficiency improvements — it’s early days for the capital-growing company. But she said the cooling system uses phase-change cooling, a method that provides a more reliable way to cool electronics than conventional air conditioners and air compressors.
A phase change cooling refrigerant has a latent heat of vaporization—the point at which it transitions from the liquid phase to the gas phase and vice versa. The liquid in the process change cooling system collects until the heat evaporates, at which point it becomes less dense and travels to the cooler part of the system. There it releases the heat, and as it does so, the gas turns into a liquid and returns to the heat source.
Phase change cooling offers many benefits, perhaps the most important being reduced energy use and costs. Unlike fans, the system does not require a constant supply of electricity to cool the units. As an added advantage, since it has no moving parts, it is prone to mechanical failure.
It’s hardly new technology. Phase-change cooling features in Xiaomi’s circa-2021 Mi 11 Ultra smartphone. And on the server front, Microsoft experimented with a two-phase cooling system on the banks of the Columbia River, using metal containment tanks to submerge servers and draw heat away from their processors.
Incolling server image based on current gigabyte blade. Image Credits: Getting inside
Rival startups are also experimenting with phase-change cooling for servers. Submer Immersion Cooling – which has venture backing – immerses servers in a special, contained liquid, allowing technicians to replace hardware components while the system is running. Meanwhile, the ZutaCore processor-cooling technology dissipates heat through liquid contact.
But Samodurova insists that Incoling, which currently has a team of 12 people, is “constantly growing” as it prepares to mass-produce the server next year. She wouldn’t comment on potential customer inquiries or revenue projections, but said one of Incall’s prototypes has been running in a data center for more than a year.
Incoling also has a partnership with PC manufacturer Gigabyte to test the incoling technology for its latest R161 Series, G-Series and H-Series server platforms. In early runs, Incooling claims to have achieved processor core temperatures of up to 20 degrees Celsius lower – resulting in up to a 10% increase in clock speed and 200 watts of lower power draw.
“The pandemic has shown how much we rely on technology and how reliable communications are,” Samodurova said. “Due to the pandemic, we were able to directly demonstrate the added value of Encoding by bridging the gap between computing needs and available solutions.”
