Ventiva’s Fanless Ionic Air Mover Targets 15% Data Center Energy Savings and Improved Uptime

As data center operators increasingly adopt direct-to-plate liquid cooling to manage heat from high-performance CPUs and GPUs, a new challenge has emerged: keeping the lower-value but essential components at the back of server racks cool. Ventiva, a cooling technology company based in the United States, says its ionic air mover can solve this problem while contributing to significant energy efficiency gains across the facility.

Carl Schlachte, CEO of Ventiva, explained that reducing the number of bulk fans at the front of racks—a common energy-saving measure in liquid-cooled data centers—can leave back-of-rack components such as network interface cards and boot-optimized storage solution (BOSS) cards vulnerable to overheating. This overheating can cause servers to throttle performance, undermining overall uptime. According to Schlachte, bulk fans currently consume about 15% of the energy flowing into data centers, making their reduction a substantial opportunity for savings.

Ventiva’s solution is a fanless air mover that uses electrohydrodynamic flow, a principle discovered over 300 years ago. The device generates a plasma field around an electrified wire, stripping positively charged ions from oxygen and nitrogen in the air. When these ions cross a gap to a negatively charged collector, they create a steady airflow. Unlike traditional fans, the air mover has no moving parts and is a fraction of the size of a standard server fan. “It doesn’t take much air movement to cool small computer components,” Schlachte said. “It takes one or two cubic feet per minute, and you can get air movement between DIMMs on the rack, and everything starts to get better almost immediately, because the system was throttling due to overheating at the back.”

The company is positioning its technology as a low-disruption upgrade for data center operators. Schlachte envisions server manufacturers approaching facility managers with an off-cycle upgrade proposal: replace existing BOSS or NIC cards with versions that have the air mover built in. “No hit to you in terms of bottom line, and you’re going to get 15% more uptime. Would you let us do an off-cycle upgrade?” he said. “The answer almost universally is yes, because uptime is revenue on both sides of the ledger.” By operating at lower temperatures, these enhanced components can improve server performance by a double-digit percentage, even as overall energy costs decline due to the reduced reliance on bulk fans.

Ventiva, originally founded 15 years ago as Thorn Micro Technologies, is currently qualifying its air movers for integration into enterprise servers. The company expects to ship its first units next year, initially targeting laptops and mini PCs such as Nook devices, before moving into the data center market. For the remainder of this year, Ventiva is conducting thermal simulations and running live card tests to ensure OEMs can accept the technology into their server designs. “Facilities managers should start seeing calls from people here pretty soon, saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got an answer for you that looks like more uptime. Just swap Card A with Card B,’” Schlachte added.