Abstract
In this contemporary world, technology is advancing at a rapid pace. In the recent decades, information technology has grown exponentially. Improving data center energy efficiency is an urgent issue with remarkable economic and environmental impacts. Enormous heat generation is fuelled by the data centers. Distribution of heat is a crucial parameter that affects data center cooling and energy consumption. Heat reduction is the crux of environmentally sustainable computing. Typically, data centres lack in effective sensing systems to monitor heat distribution at a large scale. In this chapter, I aim at using sensor networks as a dense instrumentation technology to comprehend and control cooling in data centers. This chapter presents the Aquasar project as the case study and explores the environmental challenges in developing sensor networks in data centers. I also explore the effective way of dealing with the excess heat from multiple servers in the data centers and the upper hand of water cooling over air cooling.