Air Flow Measurement and Management for Improving Cooling and Energy Efficiency in Raised-Floor Data Centers: A Survey

Recently, the rapid growth in both data center power density and scale poses great challenges to the cooling system. On one hand, the data center operators try to over provision cooling resources for fear of server failures induced by accumulated heat. On the other hand, they also want to reduce the energy cost as the cooling system takes up a significant portion of overall energy consumption. Among all available cooling solutions, air cooling dominates the data center industry due to its simpleness. However, its cooling efficiency has been questioned due to the low air density and specific heat. In this paper, we provide an overview for current endeavors to improve the air cooling efficiency. We group existing researches according to the locations where they can be applied from the perspective of air flow cycle. We also discuss the thermal measurement issues. We hope this paper can help researchers and engineers to design and control their data center air cooling systems.