Coordinated Optimization of Cooling and IT Power in Data Centers

Concurrency and exchanging design knowledge among thermal and IT management are required to achieve an energy efficient operational data center. In this paper, a design approach is presented to bring adaptability and concurrency for coordinated minimization of cooling and IT power consumption in data centers. The presented approach is centered on a proper orthogonal decomposition based reduced order thermal modeling approach, and power profiling of the IT equipment to identify the optimal parameters of the air cooling systems along with optimal dynamic workload distribution among the servers. The method is applied to a data center cell with different rack and server architectures. The results show that the design approach results in 12-70% saving in the total energy consumption of the data center cell for various scenarios, compared with a baseline design. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4001858]