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There is an ongoing
requirement for data
centres to reduce energy
consumption. Here,
Dr Jon Summers,
Scientific Leader in
Data Centres, Research
Institutes of Sweden,
SICS North, talks us
through the approach
being taken by his
organisation to reduce
end use energy demand.
n the world of data centres,
the term facility is commonly
used to indicate the shell that
provides the space, power,
cooling, physical security and protection
to house information technology.
I
The data centre sector is made up
of several different industries that
purposely have a point of intersection
that could loosely be defined as the data
centre industry.
One very important argument is that a
data centre exists to house IT but the
facility and IT domains rarely interact
unless the heat removal infrastructure
invades the IT space. This is referring
to the so called ‘liquid cooling’ of IT,
whereas normally the facility-IT divide is
cushioned by air.
At RISE SICS North we are on a crusade
to approach data centres as integrated
systems and our experiments are geared
to include the full infrastructure where the
facility has IT in it.
This holistic approach enables the
researchers to measure and monitor the
full digital stack from the ground to the
cloud and the chip to the chiller, so we
have built a management system that
makes use of several open source tools
and generates more than 9GB of data per
day from more than 30,000 measuring
points within our ICE operating data
centre depicted below.
Some of these measuring points are
provided by in-house designed and
deployed wired temperature sensor strips
that have magnetic rails allowing them to
be easily mounted to the front and back
of racks.
Recently, we have come up with a way
to take control of fans in open compute
servers in preparation for a new data
centre build project where we will try and
marry up the server requirements of air
with what can be provided by the direct
air handling units.
Before joining the research group in
Sweden, I was a full-time academic in the
School of Mechanical Engineering at the
University of Leeds.
At Leeds, our research has been focused
around thermal and energy management
of microelectronic systems and the
experiments made use of real IT, where we
Analysing full
integrated systems
to reduce end use
energy demands
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Issue 02
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