IBM has licensed its Rear Door Heat exchanger water-cooling technology to Vette Corporation, a venture-backed thermal specialist, so Vette can make it turnkey and commercialize it on industry-standard 42U racks. Vette is also supposed to develop new products.

Both companies will sell the solutions, both using IBM's Cooling Technology logo.

The widgetry involves putting a door on the back of racks holding clusters of servers, storage or communications gear and then passing warm air over an embedded chilled water coil to remove excess heat before it enters the facility whitespace.

There are no fans or moving parts so it's supposed to be reliable, offer potential energy saving and facilitate deploying fully loaded racks. That in turn can mean savings on real estate, giving sites that have exceeded their cooling capacity an alternative.

Vette quotes some analyst or another that says 50% of the data centers in the world won't have enough power to meet the power and cooling requirements of high-density computing gear by the end of next year.