Tandem Equipment Arranged Architecture with Exhaust Heat Reuse System for Software-Defined Data Center Infrastructure

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient architecture for software-defined data center infrastructures. In our proposed data center architecture, we include an exhaust heat reuse system that utilizes high-temperature exhaust heat from servers in conditioning humidity and air temperature of office space near the data center. To obtain high-temperature exhaust heat, equipment such as server racks and air conditioners are deployed in tandem so that the aisles are divided into three types: cold, hot, and super-hot. In this paper, to investigate the fundamental characteristics of our proposed data center architecture, we consider various types of data center models and conduct numerical simulations that use results obtained by experiments at an actual data center. Through simulation, we show that the total power consumption by a data center with our proposed architecture is 27% lower than that by data center with a conventional architecture. In addition, it is also shown that the proposed tandem equipment arrangement is suitable for obtaining high-temperature exhaust heat and decreasing the total power consumption significantly under a wider range of conditions than in the conventional equipment arrangement.

A Workload Assignment Policy for Reducing Power Consumption in Software-Defined Data Center Infrastructure

“…The tandem data center model is based on a novel equipment arrangement proposed in our previous study [8]. In the tandem data center model, aisles are divided into cold, hot, and super hot aisles, by arranging the exhaust side of one row (the first row) to face the inlet side of the other row (the second row) as shown in Fig.…”

“…In our research group, we have started a project to de- Copyright c 2016 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers velop an augmented data center infrastructure management system (A-DCIM) for coordinated and energy-efficient operation of data center infrastructure units such as servers, air conditioners, exhaust heat reuse systems, and so on [8].…”

“…We call a data center infrastructure that uses the A-DCIM a software-defined data center infrastructure. In [8], as the first step of the project, we proposed a novel data center architecture and evaluated its effectiveness through numerical evaluations by using experimental results obtained from our data center testbed, Keihanna Data Center.…”

“…To evaluate the power consumption of data center taking into account airflow and air temperature, we use a computational fluid dynamics simulator [9]. We show the reduction potential of air conditioning power for two kinds of data center models: conventional data center model and tandem data center model which is based on our novel architecture proposed in [8].…”

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Green and Energy-Efficient Cloud Computing Part II

“…In [3], the focus in on air conditioners, which are one of the main energy consumers in data centers. The authors observe that private data centers are often placed within larger buildings, and therefore are adjacent to office space.…”