Thermal management in rack scale architecture system with shared power and shared cooling

Abstract

In today's data center, in order to achieve higher density and better energy efficiency, the traditional server systems with dedicated fans and power supply units are evolving to the Rack Scale System with shared cooling and shared power supply at rack level, some examples are Open Compute Project and China Scorpio Rack. This evolution brings the challenges of how to efficiently control the rack cooling and effectively manage the rack power at coarse granularity level, e.g. at the whole rack or half rack level, while no increasing in system cost and management complexity. In this paper, the management architecture for the Rack Scale System is introduced, the cooling zone, power zone, and the parameters for thermal and power management are elaborated. Some new virtual sensors for thermal management are also introduced in this paper, the modeling method for the volumetric airflow virtual sensor is described, and the validation test results are presented. With the rack thermal and power management, the IT devices can be closely associated with the datacenter facilities, and thus be intelligently orchestrated and adapted to the workload for TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) saving and reliability improvement.