Energy Audit of Data Centers and Server Rooms on an Academic Campus: Impact of Energy Conservation Measures

The main goals of the work presented here were to investigate the energy consumption profiles in data centers and server rooms on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park, and identify energy conservation measures and the potential savings they can represent. The energy audit process conducted for this study investigated the server rooms’ infrastructure, operational issues, the EnergyConservation Measures (ECMs), and consolidation/co-location opportunities. The identified ECMs were carried out starting with high-reward/low-cost/no-cost investments, such as optimization of the server rooms’ layout, rearrangement of the tile configuration and the racks, removal of unnecessary items and equipment from the data center rooms, increasing the set point temperatures of the cooling units, and installing hot aisle/cold aisle containment. The server rooms were modeled using commercially available software, and temperature sensors and relative humidity sensors used throughout the energy audit study were instrumental in identifying and validating the implemented ECMs. Selected case studies of the audited campus server rooms are also presented in this paper and the learned lessons of their Energy Conservation Measures implementation are also discussed.