Globally Optimised Energy-Efficient Data Centres

Data centres are part of today's critical information and communication infrastructure, and the majority of business transactions as well as much of our digital life now depend on them. At the same time, data centres are large primary energy consumers, with energy consumed by IT and server room air conditioning equipment and also by general building facilities. In many data centres, IT equipment energy and cooling energy requirements are not always coordinated, so energy consumption is not optimised. Most data centres lack an integrated energy management system that jointly optimises and controls all its energy consuming equipments in order to reduce energy consumption and increase the usage of local renewable energy sources. In this chapter, the authors discuss the challenges of coordinated energy management in data centres and present a novel scalable, integrated energy management system architecture for data centre wide optimisation. A prototype of the system has been implemented, including joint workload and thermal management algorithms. The control algorithms are evaluated in an accurate simulation-based model of a real data centre. Results show significant energy savings potential, in some cases up to 40%, by integrating workload and thermal management.