Review on Cooling System Energy Consumption in Internet Data Centers

Abstract

Due to the advancement of the telecommunication and information technology (IT) industry, internet data centers (IDCs) have become widespread in the public and private sectors. As such, energy demand in the center has also become increasingly prominent. Several technologies on energy management have been studied to determine the options available to minimize the energy required to operate the data center as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The cooling system is required to remove the high heat dissipated by the IT electronic components especially the servers in order to ensure safe and reliable working condition. However, it utilizes more than one-third of the total energy consumption in the data center. In this study, the energy efficiency technologies that are usually applied to cooling systems in data centers were reviewed. The aim is to find out the strategies that will reduce the energy consumption of the cooling system since the cooling demand in data center is all year round. Prior to that, the performance metric tool that is mostly used in analyzing data center efficiency was discussed. The conventional cooling system technologies that are utilized in data centers were also provided. Lastly, innovative cooling technologies for future solutions in data centers were discussed.