Data centres (DCs) are currently consuming an average of 2% of electricity produced (based on U.S. consumption alone). Efforts to improve the efficiency of these facilities has yielded impressive results in the last 5 years but authoritative sources assert that better data is needed to continue further. We believe that IoT in DCs provides the best solution to monitor and improve DC efficiencies. A critical mass of DCs publishing their usage data is required to correlate and develop best practice solutions for energy savings. Different types of data centres have varying power and water consumption profiles. The current best practice of using PUE (Power Usage Efficiency) doesn’t provide the full picture of DC performance.
In response to the above, the purpose of this proposal is to integrate a live Data Centre into the FIESTA-IoT ecosystem. This integration comes in the form of sensor data on power, cooling and ambient weather which will be made available to experimenters and other data centre owners as open linked data set through the FIESTA-IoT facilities. We will leverage the technology and ontology developed by the FIESTA-IoT consortium. Where additional software is required to integrate our sensors, testbed and historical observations, this will be made available as open source software. Through targeted workshops and online training, we intend to grow a community of data centre operators and experimenters in the Higher Educational Institute, Telecoms and Manufacturing sectors who can use the data and tools for experimentation and operational support. Our view is that removing barriers to access our data will be for the benefit all.
RealDC is being developed by TSSG at Waterford Institute of Technology.
