Methods for Reducing Energy Consumption, Optimization in Operational Data Centers

Abstract

This paper proposes a methods to reduce energy consumption in an operational data center facility. Data centers are the places where Information Technology and Communications equipment are hosted. From the day when the first computer was developed, the room that houses the mainframe faced with challenges regarding power and cooling requested, redundancy and availability for the systems to avoid any interruption, also with capacity planning for future expansions. All back-up and hot stand-by system are more often over-sized the focus are on availability nor on efficiency. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) evolution, the need to compute and store more information lead to exponential increase of ICT equipment. The technology evolution lead to changes of equipment hosted in Data Centers with more performant systems but with high density of energy consumed. The virtualization of services is a way to increase computing performance with increasing utilization load of processors. Overall IT systems providing, the same functionality more efficient, consuming less power. Usually the evolution of ICT infrastructure (consolidation) is not correlated with facility changes that will impact the performance of existing data center. Increasing the power density in an operational computer room will produce a major impact to cooling system capacity and efficiency. The challenge is to avoid overheat areas (hot spots) and to provide same environment condition without changing the space geometry or design, increasing the efficiency and optimize energy consumption.