ASHRAE - American Society of Heating@ Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers@ Inc.
Scope
"INTRODUCTION Have you ever asked yourself why the automobile's dashboard looks the way it does? The four top-level gauges are generally the speedometer@ the fuel gauge@ the engine-temperature gauge@ and the clock. They provide the most important information a driver needs to know to stay out of trouble and keep moving. A second tier of warning icons are hidden from view until something goes wrong with the vehicle (e.g.@ check engine icon) or the behavior of the passengers (e.g.@ fasten seatbelt icon). This hierarchy is a time tested way of arranging the information provided to the driver. A data center facility should provide an adequate thermal IT-equipment environment while minimizing infrastructure energy usage. Curbing energy consumption in energy intensive data centers is important for economic reasons and ensuring a satisfactory operating thermal environment is important for protecting IT-equipment from failure. However@ there is a perceived conflict between these two important goals. The most scrutinized link is ""air management@"" which essentially is about keeping cold and hot air from mixing. Cold supply air from the air handler should enter the heat-generating IT-equipment without mixing with ambient air and the hot exhaust air should return to the air handler without mixing. Managing the cold and hot air streams in data centers is important both for infrastructure energy management and IT-equipment thermal management. Air management has great potential to make data centers more energy efficient. Correctly implemented air management also has great potential to improve the thermal IT-equipment conditions. The information required to implement effective air management can be obtained by monitoring only three data entities: Infrastructure energy efficiency@ thermal IT-equipment conditions@ and air management effectiveness. A number of useful metrics have been developed over the past years. This paper lays out analogous rationale to the automobile dashboard as well as the justification for selecting three of those metrics for the proposed top-level energy and environmental dashboard for data center monitoring."