Free cooling: A paradigm shift in data centers

The crossroads of sustainable development and data centers are examined due to the growing demand for electricity, and the increasing size of the carbon footprint of data centers worldwide. Free cooling involves using the natural climate to cool the data center as opposed to the more traditional method of using conventional systems such as air-conditioning. In our research, we consider retrofitting a data center as a complex decision-making problem. Case based reasoning and decision trees are two widely used techniques in the area of decision support. We propose to employ these two techniques in the framework of sustainable development to assist decision makers in the evolving design of data centers, with specific reference to free cooling.