Impacts of Increasing Temperature and Relative Humidity in Air-Cooled Tropical Data Centers

Data centers (DCs) are power-intensive facilities which use a significant amount of energy for cooling the servers. Increasing the temperature and relative humidity (RH) setpoints is a rule-of-thumb approach to reducing the DC energy usage. However, the high temperature and RH may undermine the server's reliability. Before we can choose the proper temperature and RH settings, it is essential to understand how the temperature and RH setpoints affect the DC power usage and server's reliability. To this end, we constructed and experimented with an air-cooled DC testbed in Singapore, which consists of a direct expansion cooling system and 521 servers running real-world application workloads. This paper presents the key measurement results and observations from our 11-month experiments. Our results suggest that by operating at a supply air temperature setpoints of 29°C, our testbed achieves substantial cooling power saving with little impact on the server's reliability. Furthermore, we present a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis framework which guides settings of the temperature and RH for a DC. Our observations and TCO analysis framework will be useful to future efforts in building and operating air-cooled DCs in tropics and beyond.