Integrated Design and Management of a Sustainable Data Center

Author(s):  
Brian J. Watson ◽  
Amip J. Shah ◽  
Manish Marwah ◽  
Cullen E. Bash ◽  
Ratnesh K. Sharma ◽  
...  

The environmental impact of data centers is significant and is growing rapidly. However, there are many opportunities for greater efficiency through integrated design and management of data center components. To that end, we propose a sustainable data center that replaces conventional services in the physical infrastructures with more environmentally friendly IT services. We have identified five principles for achieving this vision: data center scale lifecycle design, flexible and configurable building blocks, pervasive sensing, knowledge discovery and visualization, and autonomous control. We describe these principles and present specific use cases for their application. Successful implementation of the sustainable data center vision will require multi-disciplinary collaboration across various research and industry communities.

Author(s):  
Christopher Hoover ◽  
Brian Watson ◽  
Ratnesh Sharma ◽  
Sue Charles ◽  
Amip Shah ◽  
...  

In this paper, we describe an integrated design and management approach for building next-generation cities. This approach leverages IT technology in both the design and operational phases to optimize sustainability over a broad set of metrics while lowering costs. We call this approach a Sustainable IT Ecosystem. Our approach is based on five principles: ecosystem-scale life-cycle design; scalable and configurable infrastructure building blocks; pervasive sensing; data analytics and visualization; and autonomous control. Application of the approach is demonstrated for two case studies: an urban water infrastructure and an urban power microgrid. We conclude by discussing future opportunities to co-design and integrate these independent infrastructures, gaining further efficiencies.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 3301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Basmadjian

The power demand (kW) and energy consumption (kWh) of data centers were augmented drastically due to the increased communication and computation needs of IT services. Leveraging demand and energy management within data centers is a necessity. Thanks to the automated ICT infrastructure empowered by the IoT technology, such types of management are becoming more feasible than ever. In this paper, we look at management from two different perspectives: (1) minimization of the overall energy consumption and (2) reduction of peak power demand during demand-response periods. Both perspectives have a positive impact on total cost of ownership for data centers. We exhaustively reviewed the potential mechanisms in data centers that provided flexibilities together with flexible contracts such as green service level and supply-demand agreements. We extended state-of-the-art by introducing the methodological building blocks and foundations of management systems for the above mentioned two perspectives. We validated our results by conducting experiments on a lab-grade scale cloud computing data center at the premises of HPE in Milano. The obtained results support the theoretical model, by highlighting the excellent potential of flexible service level agreements in Green IT: 33% of overall energy savings and 50% of power demand reduction during demand-response periods in the case of data center federation.


Author(s):  
Burak Kantarci ◽  
Hussein T. Mouftah

Cloud computing aims to migrate IT services to distant data centers in order to reduce the dependency of the services on the limited local resources. Cloud computing provides access to distant computing resources via Web services while the end user is not aware of how the IT infrastructure is managed. Besides the novelties and advantages of cloud computing, deployment of a large number of servers and data centers introduces the challenge of high energy consumption. Additionally, transportation of IT services over the Internet backbone accumulates the energy consumption problem of the backbone infrastructure. In this chapter, the authors cover energy-efficient cloud computing studies in the data center involving various aspects such as: reduction of processing, storage, and data center network-related power consumption. They first provide a brief overview of the existing approaches on cool data centers that can be mainly grouped as studies on virtualization techniques, energy-efficient data center network design schemes, and studies that monitor the data center thermal activity by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The authors also present solutions that aim to reduce energy consumption in data centers by considering the communications aspects over the backbone of large-scale cloud systems.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S11) ◽  
pp. 4052-4056

This paper proposes to improve the process of technological renewal in data centers with the implementation of hyperconverged systems, through the virtualization of physical equipment, networks, storage and systems, to achieve cost reduction in critical areas such as: maintenance, consumption of energy, data center space and the optimization of the resources necessary for the administration and specialization of the IT team. The proposed methodology HSA (Hyperconverged Systems Applied), considers the planning and implementation of an integral IT architecture that combines software with high-level servers that can host systems capable of providing support and continuity of IT services, to design, implement and manage the technology in an orderly manner, reducing management efforts and increasing the organization's ability to support new projects. According to the results obtained with the application of the HSA methodology, it was reduced the size of virtualized systems by an average of 33.33% and the amount of non-virtualized technology by an average of 44.33%, depending on the cases evaluated was increased the level of IT team experience at 56.67% when managing more technology with less staff


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Thomas Batz ◽  
Reinhard Herzog ◽  
Jon Summers ◽  
Kym Watson

The Internet of Things (IoT) domain has been one of the fastest growing areas in the computer industry for the last few years. Consequently, IoT applications are becoming the dominant work load for many data centers. This has implications for the designers of data centers, as they need to meet their customers' requirements. Since it is not easy to use real applications for the design and test of data center setups, a tool is required to emulate real applications but is easy to configure, scale and deploy in a data center. This paper will introduce a simple but generic way to model the work load of typical IoT applications, in order to have a realistic and reproducible way to emulate IT loads for data centers. IoT application designers are in the process of harmonizing their approaches on how architectures should look, which building blocks are needed, and how they should interwork. While all IoT subdomains are diverse when it comes to the details, the architectural blueprints are becoming more and more aligned. These blueprints are called reference architectures and incorporate similar patterns for the underlying application primitives. This paper will introduce an approach to decompose IoT applications into such application primitives, and use them to emulate a workload as it would be created by the modeled application. The paper concludes with an example application of the IoT Workload Emulation in the BodenTypeDC experiment, where new cooling approaches for data centers have been tested under realistic work load conditions.


Author(s):  
Chris Muller ◽  
Chuck Arent ◽  
Henry Yu

Abstract Lead-free manufacturing regulations, reduction in circuit board feature sizes and the miniaturization of components to improve hardware performance have combined to make data center IT equipment more prone to attack by corrosive contaminants. Manufacturers are under pressure to control contamination in the data center environment and maintaining acceptable limits is now critical to the continued reliable operation of datacom and IT equipment. This paper will discuss ongoing reliability issues with electronic equipment in data centers and will present updates on ongoing contamination concerns, standards activities, and case studies from several different locations illustrating the successful application of contamination assessment, control, and monitoring programs to eliminate electronic equipment failures.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Anna Jankowska ◽  
Piotr Jankowski

The article presents the Idaho Geospatial Data Center (IGDC), a digital library of public-domain geographic data for the state of Idaho. The design and implementation of IGDC are introduced as part of the larger context of a geolibrary model. The article presents methodology and tools used to build IGDC with the focus on a geolibrary map browser. The use of IGDC is evaluated from the perspective of accessa and demand for geographic data. Finally, the article offers recommendations for future development of geospatial data centers.


Author(s):  
Tianyi Gao ◽  
James Geer ◽  
Bahgat G. Sammakia ◽  
Russell Tipton ◽  
Mark Seymour

Cooling power constitutes a large portion of the total electrical power consumption in data centers. Approximately 25%∼40% of the electricity used within a production data center is consumed by the cooling system. Improving the cooling energy efficiency has attracted a great deal of research attention. Many strategies have been proposed for cutting the data center energy costs. One of the effective strategies for increasing the cooling efficiency is using dynamic thermal management. Another effective strategy is placing cooling devices (heat exchangers) closer to the source of heat. This is the basic design principle of many hybrid cooling systems and liquid cooling systems for data centers. Dynamic thermal management of data centers is a huge challenge, due to the fact that data centers are operated under complex dynamic conditions, even during normal operating conditions. In addition, hybrid cooling systems for data centers introduce additional localized cooling devices, such as in row cooling units and overhead coolers, which significantly increase the complexity of dynamic thermal management. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to characterize the dynamic responses of data centers under variations from different cooling units, such as cooling air flow rate variations. In this study, a detailed computational analysis of an in row cooler based hybrid cooled data center is conducted using a commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. A representative CFD model for a raised floor data center with cold aisle-hot aisle arrangement fashion is developed. The hybrid cooling system is designed using perimeter CRAH units and localized in row cooling units. The CRAH unit supplies centralized cooling air to the under floor plenum, and the cooling air enters the cold aisle through perforated tiles. The in row cooling unit is located on the raised floor between the server racks. It supplies the cooling air directly to the cold aisle, and intakes hot air from the back of the racks (hot aisle). Therefore, two different cooling air sources are supplied to the cold aisle, but the ways they are delivered to the cold aisle are different. Several modeling cases are designed to study the transient effects of variations in the flow rates of the two cooling air sources. The server power and the cooling air flow variation combination scenarios are also modeled and studied. The detailed impacts of each modeling case on the rack inlet air temperature and cold aisle air flow distribution are studied. The results presented in this work provide an understanding of the effects of air flow variations on the thermal performance of data centers. The results and corresponding analysis is used for improving the running efficiency of this type of raised floor hybrid data centers using CRAH and IRC units.


Author(s):  
Amip J. Shah ◽  
Van P. Carey ◽  
Cullen E. Bash ◽  
Chandrakant D. Patel

Data centers today contain more computing and networking equipment than ever before. As a result, a higher amount of cooling is required to maintain facilities within operable temperature ranges. Increasing amounts of resources are spent to achieve thermal control, and tremendous potential benefit lies in the optimization of the cooling process. This paper describes a study performed on data center thermal management systems using the thermodynamic concept of exergy. Specifically, an exergy analysis has been performed on sample data centers in an attempt to identify local and overall inefficiencies within thermal management systems. The development of a model using finite volume analysis has been described, and potential applications to real-world systems have been illustrated. Preliminary results suggest that such an exergy-based analysis can be a useful tool in the design and enhancement of thermal management systems.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 115 ◽  
Author(s):  
MdAfzalul Aftab ◽  
Qin Yuanjian ◽  
Nadia Kabir

The successful implementation of push-pull supply chain management strategy has an important role in improving the competitiveness of an organization. The objective of a push-pull strategy is to minimize the holding of inventory level in finished form and rather produce finished goods from semi-finished inventory only upon receiving final order. One of the vital building blocks of push-pull supply chain strategy is postponement. The main objective of this review paper is to discuss the concept of postponement and its sub-categories such as product postponement and process postponement and their benefits. Then it is investigated how two prominent fast fashion retailers who are also categorized as original brand manufacturers in the apparel value chain apply the two variants of process postponement e.g. process standardization and process re-sequencing in their manufacturing operations to activate push pull supply chain strategy. The push-pull supply chain strategy in turn helps to reduce their order-to-delivery lead time to stores, reduce inventory holding level and minimize both physical costs and market mediation costs. The paper ends with concluding remarks. A framework is developed to illustrate the push-pull supply mechanism. This paper is a useful resource for practitioners in apparel supply chain willing to remove inefficiencies, costs and risks in their operations.


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