I-Corps: DataCOOL Software Application

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Data centers (DC) are digital warehouses for information technology (IT) equipment such as computer servers, network switches, and storage devices. To maintain their computational reliability, waste heat from the DC facility is removed by dedicated cooling hardware such as computer room air conditioning units and rear door heat exchangers. Because these cooling hardware systems demand 40-50% of the data center electricity consumption (often in the order of few million kWh), their energy-efficient operation is imperative for the optimization of total cost of ownership for a DC. This team has developed a real-time software application that will recommend the optimal cooling set-points for different cooling hardware in a data center. The proposed software (DataCOOL) will deliver real-time end-to-end cooling resource optimization software for data centers. The critical value proposition of DataCOOL lies in its data center cooling cost optimization, derived from elastic resource allocation and risk mitigation from stochastic data center traffic. These values are derived from a model-order reduction algorithm. The proposed technology could potentially save 15-25% of a data center's annual operational expenditure. An extensive literature survey indicates that the proposed methodology is substantially different from the existing approaches. The primary target customers would include large IT companies with data centers such as: Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. On the other hand, the team also expects to work closely with mid-size data center companies like Equinix, Internap, and QTS to validate that the proposed prototype is delivering claimed cost-saving benefits.