Abstract
The advent of cloud computing has nurtured an unprecedented growth of datacentres. With its growth, the main concern for service providers and data centre owners is toefficiently manage the energy of the data centres without compromising their computingcapabilities. This concern is genuine as data centres utilise 10-30 times more energy thanoffice spaces and also generate immense heat. As cooling accounts for half of the total powerconsumption in data centres, efficient cooling systems have become a vital need for datacentres. This has resulted in increased research and innovation in the field of efficient coolingof data centres, which in turn has led to growth in filing of patents in this domain. Patents aretechno-legal documents that contain different kinds of information that is accessible to all. Inthe present study, patents are used as source of information for competitive/businessintelligence to highlight the technological trends in the field of energy efficient cooling of datacentres. The study reveals that IBM, HP, Schneider and Hon Hai Industries are the majorplayers working in this technological area. Contrary to the notion that air conditioning wouldbe the most researched area for cooling data centres, the study reveals that there is alsointerest in the hardware of the servers and racks to produce less heat or to have built-incooling mechanisms. The main technologies for which patents are being filed includeventilation using gaseous coolant, technologies related to rack design as well as liquid cooling.Original equipment manufacturers and other vendors have increased filings, along with cloudservice providers. Most of these technologies originate from Asia-Pacific and this region is astrong market, following the USA.
Highlights
To survive in the dynamic business environment, it is imperative for organisations to have relevant and timely business information for decision making
The search strategy consisted of a combination of keywords and International Patent Classification (IPC; WIPO, 2016) and Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC; European Patent Office, 2016) classification codes relevant to the topic, as they are considered to be a proxy technology indicator based on hierarchical assignment and the categories to which every patent may belong (Pulate et al, 2015)
While Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leader in the public cloud computing space, companies like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Baidu and Google are the obvious players in this domain as IBM, Dell, Oracle and HP are traditionally involved in hardware related products and services while Google has its own data centres across the globe (Kepes, 2015; Weinberge, 2015) and Baidu has its presence in China and is slowly moving to a global position
Summary
To survive in the dynamic business environment, it is imperative for organisations to have relevant and timely business information for decision making. Patents are used as a source of information for competitive/business intelligence and highlight the technological trends in the field of energy efficient cooling of data centres. Due to the advent of cloud computing environments, data centres have experienced unprecedented growth in their size and population (Judge, 2015; Jones Lang LaSalle, 2016) These densely populated data centres dissipate heat and needs large cooling units to keep temperatures within the functional levels, thereby increasing the demand for power (Suja et al, 2012). Patent data available from the patent offices of different nations are a huge resource of techno-legal information If this patent data is properly analysed, it can provide various business intelligence insights focusing on technological trends and their patent filings, the newly emerging technologies and products in a particular domain and competitors’ intellectual property strategies (Deshpande et al, 2014; Ahmed et al, 2013).
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