Energy Audit of Data Centers and Server Rooms on an Academic Campus—A Case Study

The main goal of the work reported here was to analyze the energy consumption profile needs and identify conservation opportunities in data centers and server rooms on a research-oriented major university campus. This study describes the energy audit of more than thirty small to medium size server rooms on the University of Maryland, College Park, Campus. Comprehensive energy audit investigations were carried out for each site to (1) determine existing infrastructure conditions and operational issues, and (2) identify growth opportunities and consolidation potential, as well as to (3) define low cost/no cost energy conservation measures to improve the power utilization effectiveness through the overall reduction in the energy usage. The validity of the energy conservation measures was tested through computational fluid dynamics analysis using 3D models, created using 6-sigma software from Future Facilities. Some of the energy conservation measures are quantitative, such as increasing the cooling unit return air set point temperature and number of cooling units in use, whilst other energy conservation measures are qualitative, such as optimizing the location of the vented floor tiles and modification of site layout to optimize air management. For three case study sites, the energy audit study reveals potential power utilization effectiveness improvement accompanied with annual energy savings of 93.7 MWh.