Integrated thermal management of a 150kW pilot Open Compute Project style data center

Data centers are core to modern digital society, however their growth and increased end-use energy demand has brought them under focus from both the electrical energy providers and governments. This paper presents operational monitoring of a publicly funded energy and cost efficient pilot data center built in the north of Sweden, which has one pod populated with legacy Open Compute Project (OCP) information technology (IT) hardware, that is cooled and powered in a similar vein to the large scale OCP data centers that are operating today, using direct air with evaporative function for both cooling and humidification and no centralised Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS). The function of the data center POD1 is achieved via the use of a chain of opensource software that monitors and orchestrates IT workload in a predefined approach to measure and deploy its operation. The first stage of the data center development effort has concentrated on a unified approach to environmental control that effectively combines both the direct fresh air with the IT level cooling control that demonstrates a consistently low Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.04.