Shutter control for cooling air flow management in data center servers

Abstract

The growth of energy consumption in data centers is becoming one of the significant problems all over the world. The power usage of IT devices and air-conditioning (AC) units accounts for up to three-quarters of total energy consumption in typical data centers. This study discusses the effectiveness of using shutter-controlled air flow management to control cold air flow into the servers. It can impact the power consumption of both, the servers and the AC units. A raised floor data center has two types of aisles - cold and hot. In most cases, excessive volumes of cold air are pumped into the servers using cold aisles. We are proposing the utilization of a shutter to control the air flow and reduce wastage while preventing damage due to increased CPU temperature. The shutter is intended to control the air flow and maintain the temperature appropriately according to the workload of the servers. We evaluated the proposed system for controlling the flow of air into the servers. The results show that cold air volumes can be reduced by up to 92% while maintaining appropriate control of CPU temperature.