Autonomous monitoring of data centre operations

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The computing needs of our society, much of these performed in data centres (DCs), double every five years. However, despite their increasing productivity, DCs are fraught with (1) high capital costs for establishment, and (2) high operating costs due to inefficient energy usage. The high costs arise from the widespread industry practice of over-design and over-provisioning stemmed from the fact that operators do not have real-time visibility of the metrics of performance, e.g., utilization percentage and energy consumption, or health conditions, e.g., indicators for imminent faults and failures, of the various components within their facilities. The primary bottleneck in enabling real-time visibility is that each facility consists of thousands of components, which differ by vendors, design and operating principles. Herein, we will develop three enabling technologies towards a universal platform for monitoring DC operations with minimal human intervention, namely, (1) inexpensive monitoring hardware modules that can record and wirelessly transmit health conditions and performance metrics of various components in a DC, (2) wireless networking protocols for real-time communications of monitoring data and commands, (3) algorithms for fully autonomous monitoring and diagnosis enabled by the real-time data collected and computational efficient thermal modelling. These technologies will allow DC operators to (1) adaptively optimize its operations, and (2) predict and trigger maintenance efforts to minimize service interruptions. The technologies will be translated into a holistic data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) product line by our partner, Cinnos Mission Critical Incorporated (CMCI, www.cinnos.com), a fast growing young Canadian company. CMCI will perform extensive beta testing with lead customers synergistically with our efforts, and provide valuable feedback to steer the technology development towards maximum commercial impact. In addition to creating jobs and new sources of revenue for our industry partner, a natural and noteworthy consequence is the significant reduction in energy consumption of DCs, which account for ~3% of the energy produced worldwide.