Ambient temperature optimization for enterprise servers: Key to large-scale energy savings

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, & Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has for many years recommended that data center owners save energy by reducing air conditioning and warming up the data center. For the first 25 years of the computer industry, this was very sound advice because there was virtually no relationship between the operating temperature of enterprise computing servers and their energy efficiency. But for the most recent several years, this is no longer the case. Extensive Oracle research has demonstrated that with the latest generations of enterprise computing servers there are now strongly-coupled temperature-accelerated wastage mechanisms in IT server and storage systems that not only waste significant energy in warm data centers, but also degrade compute performance. This presentation shows novel Oracle temperature-aware algorithms that enable intelligent optimization of data center ambient temperatures to minimize or avoid these heretofore non-observable energy wastage mechanisms in IT systems. Oracle´s suite of “Intelligent Energy Aware Data Center” (iEADC) algorithms predict an optimal ambient temperature set point, eliminating energy wastage throughout the data center, significantly increasing overall compute performance, decreasing the carbon footprint, while increasing return-on-assets for data center owners.