Abstract
The total energy demand of data centres has experienced an important increase in the last years. Due to their unique nature, data centres demand enormous amounts of energy. Therefore, they are ideal candidates for implementing actions to reduce the energy consumption and thus improve their ecological footprint while at the same time reduce their operational costs. The aim of this work is to develop and to validate with experimental data a dynamic energy model of a real data centre located in Barcelona. The dynamic energy model is then used first to characterize the energy consumption and the energy efficiency of the infrastructure and second to see the benefits of the implementation of different energy efficiency strategies into the data centre cooling system portfolio. The results show an average Power Effective Usage (PUE) of 1,74 while some of the proposed strategies can achieve important energy reductions, up to 21%, in the cooling energy consumption. Therefore, the combination of them can achieve important reductions in the overall data centre energy consumption. The validated energy model can then be used to study the benefit of the implementation of different energy efficiency strategies in other data centres.
Highlights
Data centres are continuously growing in size, complexity and energy demand due to the increasing demand for storage, networking and computing
Further research should be done in order to optimize the management system minimizing the overall data centre energy consumption and taking into account particular Information Technology (IT) equipment consumption
The increasing energy demand of the data centre industry has put the sector under pressure to limit its environmental impact and reduce energy costs
Summary
Data centres are continuously growing in size, complexity and energy demand due to the increasing demand for storage, networking and computing. Due to the recent increase of data centre industry many researchers have been focusing on the implementation of energy efficiency strategies into the cooling system. Choo et al [7] evaluated experimentally and numerically the energy efficiency performance of a medium size data centre at the campus of the University of Maryland. They assessed energy conservation measures such as eliminating unnecessary CRAH units, increasing the return set point temperature, using of cold aisle containment and implementing free cooling. Depoorter et al [10] developed a dynamic energy model using TRNSYS to assess the potential of direct air free cooling in the data centre portfolio around Europe
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