Study of Thermal Performance and Power Saving for IT Equipment in a Data Center
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Chen, Chin-Huei
Abstract
The quantity of data centers has increased continuously in recent years. The power required for a data center to cool its IT (Information Technology) equipment is typically approximately 35%~45% of the data center’s power consumption. Data centers house many racks and a large number of servers. In this study, effective thermal management has been developed for IT equipment from component level to server system level, and also applied to data center level for efficient power saving. For component level, thermal analysis is used to examine design tradeoffs for heat sinks and fans to reduce power consumption in servers. Heat sinks constructed of aluminum and copper with various fin number and thickness were analyzed. The rotation rate and dimension change of fan are compared for power saving, the result shows that rotation rate change can get the better power saving than dimension change. All-aluminum sinks have the lowest hardware cost for a given thermal specification. The hardware cost for sinks with a copper base and aluminum fins is higher than that of all-aluminum sinks, but the former is more cost effective if we consider electricity consumption, because the fan speed required to achieve the same thermal performance as that of an all-aluminum heat sink is 28.1% lower, representing a 16.5 W reduction in consumption. The annual savings in electricity costs could amount to 19 USD. If we calculate using the 4-year life cycle of hardware, 77.3 USD can be saved, greatly more than offsets the heat sink hardware cost difference of 1.4 USD. This study shall serve as a reference for IT equipment dissipation design. In addition to taking hardware price differences into account, it is recommended that a compromised design be adopted to save more electricity costs and the money be used for hardware instead. For system level and data center level, the divided zone partition introduces the benefit of one specific zone to avoid airflow bypass and gain power savings. The partition can save 31.0% of the total fan power consumption and reduce the system airflow rate by 12.9%. For a specific load change in the server, the FSC (Fan Speed Control) function can save 31.2% of the fan power consumption. Power savings can be enhanced from 31.2% to 46.2% by implementing the divided zone partition with the FSC function. When the divided zone method is applied in a data center room, it improves the server operating airflow 39% for a specific rack inside a room with different loading racks. The utilization of a divided zone partition shows a significant power savings for IT equipment from the server level to the data center level.
Subjects
Power saving
server cooling
data center cooling
IT equipment cooling
regional partition
fan
heat sink.
SDGs
Type
thesis