Driven by the rapid growth of data storage demand and the trend of network development, the construction of data center is developing rapidly. But the uninterrupted operation of the data center requires a lot of power, and the annual energy consumption can be as high as 60 times of the average office; An hour without power in the data center can cost more than $1 million. How to help data center realize safe and reliable operation and reduce energy consumption has become an urgent problem to be solved in data center construction and operation.

Recently, Roger appeared at the "2012IBM smart cloud data center summit BBS" and introduced the latest research results of IBM in improving the energy efficiency of data centers. After the meeting, the reporter also had the honor to interview the data center energy efficiency field technology "da na".

Automation products to achieve fine operation

In order to build a high energy efficiency data center, it is necessary to grasp the actual performance of the data center and achieve refined operation. This means that automated products, such as sensors, analyzers, monitoring software will have a strong market demand. Because, the operation and maintenance personnel of the data center should be able to accurately measure the power consumption of each system of the data center, monitor and automatically analyze the micro-environment such as humidity and temperature. Able to automatically handle abnormal situations through "equipment linkage control" and set up various energy-saving operation modes; Ability to understand energy consumption in real time and monitor by category; Ability to understand data center equipment operations, and so on. There is no doubt that fine-grained operations require a variety of tools. I, BM also provides iPDU (intelligent power distribution unit), MMT (MobileMeasurementTechnology), AEM (energy management), and other hardware and software tools, help data center operations staff for real-time monitoring of energy consumption of data centres and improvement.

Roger introduced MMT in particular. MMT is a technology developed independently by IBM for environmental monitoring of data centers, which has now reached the second generation. MMT by deploying a large number of sensors for temperature, humidity, pressure, flow, such as monitoring, and can provide air conditioning, energy efficiency, asset management, distribution, batteries, fire monitoring, providing leak detection, etc., it is the core of measuring, modeling, analysis and management of the three relatively independent part in the traditional sense, organically combined as a whole, form a benign loop control.

When the reporter asked how many sensors are needed for a data center to be suitable, Roger answered frankly: "if only for monitoring temperature and humidity, then we have a clear empirical value of the location and number of sensors deployed, but how to deploy sensors for monitoring corrosion of equipment remains to be studied." Roger admits, however, the corrosion situation of monitoring and protection is becoming more and more important, because the electrical and electronics equipment waste (WEEE) directive and danger limit directive (RoHS) has banned the solder in the electronic products used in the lead, and silver solder in alternative, but the silver is easy and sulfide (such as smoke) and chloride (e.g., water) react, causing IT equipment failure rate increase. So IBM is stepping up its research.