Energy consumption data collection: case study on data center in a Thai University

Abstract

ObjectiveEnergy usage in has been increased due to the rising demand of cloud infrastructure. The government policy has been focused on building the green IT data center. The energy data need to be collected in order to monitor the energy usage. However, in an old typical data center, the building has been built with no support of such data collection. In this research, we aim to design the energy data collection system for our existing data center, a case study of data center in Thailand at the university. Based on the collected data, an energy usage monitoring system and prediction can be developed.MethodsIn the case study of Kasetsart University data center, the building and electric layouts were predetermined. The building layout and existing IT hardware were investigated. We designed the meter types and the number of meters to be installed for the building the energy data collection system. The corresponding database system was also designed for data logging, data visualization and analysis purpose.ResultsAs a result, 25 installed meters along with the add-on network system were installed for logging data. A data usage example was demonstrated by building the data visualization and analysis. The presented 1 year dataset collected showed the changes of energy usages which can be used to compare with real activities happening in the campus. This encourages the integration of other related environment data such as outside temperature which may affect the electric billing cost. The dataset can be used for prediction of the electric usage; thus, the policy for reducing the electric billing cost could be established. In this paper, as a data note, we focus on the methodology of data collection required for data center.