Abstract
Energy consumption and thermal performance are the two most important tasks in data centers (DCs) facility management. In recent years, to monitor and control their variation several performance metrics were introduced. In this paper an overview on the main important energy and thermal metrics is provided. A critical analysis to investigate mutual relations among metrics was performed, with the aim to clarify some physical aspects regarding the assessment of DC global energy performance.
Indeed, although these metrics are commonly used to assess the energy efficiency of DCs, their usefulness for encouraging lower energy consumption was poorly investigated. Moreover, an analysis on the effect of the DC thermal performance on metrics was done. The thermal management assume a key role for achieving energy saving during the operation of a DC and for the improvement of the IT equipment reliability.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
ASHRAE: 2011 Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments – Expanded Data Center Classes and Usage Guidance. Technical report, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Inc (2011)
The Green Grid: The Green Grid Energy Policy Research for Data Centres. Technical report, White Paper #25, The Green Grid (2009)
Tozer, R., Flucker, S., Romano, A.: Scalable data centre efficiency. In: CIBSE Technical Symposium, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK, 11–12 April 2013
Barroso, L.A., Hölzle, U.: The datacenter as a computer: an introduction to the design of warehouse-scale machines. Synth. Lect. Comput. Archit. 4(1), 1–108 (2009)
Koomey, J.G.: Worldwide electricity used in data centers. Environ. Res. Lett. 3(3), 034008 (2008)
Schaeppi, B., Bogner, T., Schloesser, A., Stobbe, L., De Asuncao, M.D.: Metrics for energy efficiency assessment in data centers and server rooms. In: Electronics Goes Green 2012+ (EGG), pp. 1–6. IEEE (2012)
The uptime institute: heat density trends in data processing, computer systems and telecommunication equipment. Technical report, The Uptime Institute (2000)
Wang, L., Khan, S.U.: Review of performance metrics for green data centers: a taxonomy study. J. Supercomput. 63(3), 639–656 (2011). doi:10.1007/s11227-011-0704-3(2011)
Flucker, S., Tozer, R.: Data centre energy efficiency analysis to minimize total cost of ownership. Building Serv. Eng. Res. Technol. 34(1), 103–117 (2013)
The Green Grid: Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE): A Green Grid Data Center Sustainability Metric. Technical report, White Paper #35, The Green Grid (2011)
The Green Grid: Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE): A Green Grid Data Center Sustainability Metric. Technical report, White Paper #32, The Green Grid (2010)
Lu, T., Lü, X., Remes, M., Viljanen, M.: Investigation of air management and energy performance in a data center in Finland: case study. Energy Build. 43(12), 3360–3372 (2011). doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2011.08.034
Sullivan, R.F.: Reducing bypass airflow is essential for eliminating computer room hot spots. Technical report, The Uptime Institute (2004)
Cho, J., Kim, B.S.: Evaluation of air management system’s thermal performance for superior cooling efficiency in high-density data centers. Energy Build. 43(9), 2145–2155 (2011)
Sharma, R.K., Bash, C.E., Patel, C.D.: Dimensionless parameters for evaluation of thermal design and performance of large-scale data centers. In: 8th ASME/AIAA Joint Thermophysics and Heat Transfer Conference, pp. 1–1 (2002)
Tang, Q., Mukherjee, T., Gupta, S.K., Cayton, P.: Sensor-based fast thermal evaluation model for energy efficient high-performance datacenters. In: Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, ICISIP 2006, pp. 203–208. IEEE (2006)
Schmidt, R.R., Cruz, E.E., Iyengar, M.: Challenges of data center thermal management. IBM J. Res. Dev. 49(4.5), 709–723 (2005)
Herrlin, M.K.: Rack cooling effectiveness in data centers and telecom central offices: the rack cooling index (RCI). ASHRAE Trans. 111(2), 725–731 (2005)
Tozer, R., Kurkjian, C., Salim, M.: Air management metrics in data centers. ASHRAE Trans. 115(1), 63–70 (2009)
Herrlin, M.K.: Improved data center energy efficiency and thermal performance by advanced airflow analysis. In: Digital Power Forum, pp. 10–12, San Francisco (2007)
Vangilder, J.W., Shrivastava, S.K.: Capture index: an airflow-based rack cooling performance metric. ASHRAE Trans. 113(1), 126–136 (2007)
Pelley, S., Meisner, D., Wenisch, T.F., VanGilder, J.W.: Understanding and abstracting total data center power. In: Workshop on Energy-Efficient Design, June 2009
Chinnici, M., Quintiliani, A.: An example of methodology to assess energy efficiency improvements in datacenters. In: 2013 Third International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), pp. 459–463. IEEE, Karlsruhe (2013)
Mathew, P., Ganguly, S., Greenberg, S., Sartor, D.: Self-benchmarking guide for data centers: metrics, benchmarks, actions. Technical report, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, June 2010
Durand-Estebe, B., Le Bot, C., Mancos, J.N., Arquis, E.: Data center optimization using PID regulation in CFD simulations. Energy Build. 66, 154–164 (2013)
Dumitru, I., Fagarasan, I., Iliescu, S., Said, Y.H., Ploix, S.: Increasing energy efficiency in data centers using energy management. In: 2011 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom), pp. 159–165. IEEE (2011)
Yuventi, J., Mehdizadeh, R.: A critical analysis of power usage effectiveness and its use in communicating data center energy consumption. Energy Build. 64, 90–94 (2013)
The green grid: the green grid metrics: data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) detailed analysis. Technical report, White Paper #14, The Green Grid (2008)
The green grid: the green grid data center efficiency metrics: PUE and DCIE. Technical report, White Paper #6, The Green Grid (2007)
ETSI: Operational Energy Efficiency for User (OEU): Global KPI for Data Centers. Technical report, ETSI (2013)
Brady, G.A., Kapur, N., Summers, J.L., Thompson, H.M.: A case study and critical assessment in calculating power usage effectiveness for a data centre. Energy Convers. Manage. 76, 155–161 (2013). doi:10.1016/j.enconman.2013.07.035
Patterson, M.K., Poole, S.W., Hsu, C.-H., Maxwell, D., Tschudi, W., Coles, H., Martinez, D.J., Bates, N.: TUE, a new energy-efficiency metric applied at ORNL’s Jaguar. In: Kunkel, J.M., Ludwig, T., Meuer, H.W. (eds.) ISC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7905, pp. 372–382. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Patterson, M.K.: The effect of data center temperature on energy efficiency. In: 11th Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems, ITHERM 2008. pp. 1167–1174. IEEE (2008)
The Green Grid: The Green Grid Productivity Indicator. Technical report, White Paper #15, The Green Grid (2008)
The Green Grid: ERE: a Metric for Measuring the Benefit of Reuse Energy from a Data Center. Technical report, White Paper #29, The Green Grid (2010)
Cho, J., Yang, J., Park, W.: Evaluation of air distribution system’s airflow performance for cooling energy savings in high-density data centers. Energy Build. 68, 270–279 (2014)
Tang, Q., Gupta, S.K.S., Varsamopoulos, G.: Thermal-aware task scheduling for data centers through minimizing heat recirculation. In: 2007 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, pp. 129–138, (2007). doi:10.1109/CLUSTR.2007.4629225
Moss, D., Bean, J.H.: Energy impact of increased server inlet temperature. Technical report, APC White Paper, 138 (2009)
Biswas, S., Tiwari, M., Sherwood, T., Theogarajan, L., Chong, F.T.: Fighting fire with fire: modeling the datacenter-scale effects of targeted superlattice thermal management. In: 2011 38th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), pp. 331–340. IEEE (2011)
Favoino, F., Capozzoli, A., Perino, M.: Temperature field real-time diagnosis by means of infrared imaging in data elaboration center. In: Abramowicz, W., Llorente, I.M., Surridge, M., Zisman, A., Vayssière, J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. LNEE, vol. 263. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Shah, A.J., Carey, V.P., Bash, C.E., Patel, C.D.: Exergy analysis of data center thermal management systems. J. Heat Transf. 130(2), 021401 (2008). doi:10.1115/1.2787024
Lu, X., Lu, T., Remes, M., Viljanen, M.: Preliminary analysis of energy efficiency in data center: case study. World Acad. Sci. Eng. Technol. 5(4), 04–26 (2011)
Qian, X., Li, Z., Li, Z.: A thermal environmental analysis method for data centers. Int. J. Heat Mass Transf. 62, 579–585 (2013)
Guo, Z.Y., Zhu, H.Y., Liang, X.G.: Entransy - a physical quantity describing heat transfer ability. Int. J. Heat Mass Transf. 50(13), 2545–2556 (2007)
Sharma, R.K., Bash, C.E., Patel, C.D., Friedrich, R.J., Chase, J.S.: Balance of power: dynamic thermal management for internet data centers. Internet Comput. IEEE 9(1), 42–49 (2005)
Moore, J., Chase, J., Ranganathan, P., Sharma, R.: Making scheduling “cool”: temperature aware workload placement in data centers. Technical report, in USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2005)
Mukherjee, T., Banerjee, A., Varsamopoulos, G., Gupta, S.K., Rungta, S.: Spatio-temporal thermal-aware job scheduling to minimize energy consumption in virtualized heterogeneous data centers. Comput. Netw. 53(17), 2888–2904 (2009)
Acknowledgments
Authors would like to gratefully thank Lucia Liuzzo.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Capozzoli, A., Chinnici, M., Perino, M., Serale, G. (2015). Review on Performance Metrics for Energy Efficiency in Data Center: The Role of Thermal Management. In: Klingert, S., Chinnici, M., Rey Porto, M. (eds) Energy Efficient Data Centers. E2DC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8945. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15786-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15786-3_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15785-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15786-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)