Estimation Method of Temperature Distribution and Energy Saving Technology of Air Conditioner in Data Center

Reducing the energy consumption of a data center has recently become important because the data center market is rapidly expanding. We developed the “IT-facility linkage system” to deal with this energy saving requirement. This system reduces the amount of energy consumed in a data center by linking two systems, one is the optimized server load allocation system and the other is the air conditioning optimization control system. One of the key technologies of the “IT-facility linkage system” is the precise prediction of the server inlet temperature. If we can comprehend the future temperature distributions, we can reduce the amount of energy consumed in a data center by consolidating the IT load to the more effectively cooled servers. We carried out computational thermal fluid dynamics to predict server inlet temperatures and evaluated the prediction precision by comparing the measured temperature data for this paper. As a result, we found out that when we use a detailed rack model and reproduce the characteristic air flow of a data center such as the recirculation, we can precisely predict the server inlet temperature to within less than one degree.