Robotic mapping and monitoring of data centers

Abstract

We describe an inexpensive autonomous robot capable of navigating previously unseen data centers and monitoring key metrics such as air temperature 1 . The robot provides real-time navigation and sensor data to commercial IBM software, thereby enabling real-time generation of the data center layout, a thermal map and other visualizations of energy dynamics. Once it has mapped a data center, the robot can efficiently monitor it for hot spots and other anomalies using intelligent sampling. We demonstrate the robot's effectiveness via experimental studies from two production data centers.

A robot as mobile sensor and agent in data center energy management

“…Patel et al [7,6] argued for the value of a robotic approach to data center monitoring and management, but without providing any details about an actual implementation. In prior work [5], members of the current author group describe an initial robot for autonomously mapping and monitoring in data centers -in other words, a robot for taking on much of the role of the human in the hand-pushed MMT solution of Hamann et al In the current work, we take the robot several steps further, first by making the robot far more robust to practical environments and second by taking steps towards imbuing the robot with automated, thermally-aware, diagnostic capability.…”

“…See Figure 1. (2) In a data center in which the robot has done a prior dense scan, the robot chooses a set of most informative locations from which to do faster, selective scans as described in [5]. Within the MEO application, hot thresholds have been set 2 in the neighborhoods of the front of various racks to help ensure sufficiently cool air is received into the air intake of the various IT equipment.…”

Locating and tracking data center assets using active RFID tags and a mobile robot

“…The use of a mobile robot for autonomously navigating and generating a map of a computer data center was established in [7], [8]. In addition to generating a map of the data center layout, the robot in these papers also performed a series of environmental readings which played an integral role in the thermal management of these centers.…”

A High-Fidelity Temperature Distribution Forecasting System for Data Centers

“…In [19], a fusion-based approach is developed to detect hot spots in data centers using measurements of multiple sensors. Robotic systems have also been designed to roam inside the data centers for plotting thermal map [20] and energy management [21]. However, these studies are not concerned with the real-time temperature prediction.…”