Pub Date : 2024-03-20DOI: 10.1109/TSUSC.2024.3379550
Duc Van Le;Jing Zhou;Rongrong Wang;Rui Tan;Fei Duan
Data centers (DCs) are power-intensive facilities which use a significant amount of energy for cooling the servers. Increasing the temperature and relative humidity (RH) setpoints is a rule-of-thumb approach to reducing the DC energy usage. However, the high temperature and RH may undermine the server's reliability. Before we can choose the proper temperature and RH settings, it is essential to understand how the temperature and RH setpoints affect the DC power usage and server's reliability. To this end, we constructed and experimented with an air-cooled DC testbed in Singapore, which consists of a direct expansion cooling system and 521 servers running real-world application workloads. This paper presents the key measurement results and observations from our 11-month experiments. Our results suggest that by operating at a supply air temperature setpoints of 29 $^{circ }$