A quantitative analysis of cooling power in container-based data centers

Cooling power is often represented as a single taxed cost on the total energy consumption of the data center. Some estimates go as far as 50% of the total energy demand. However, this view is rather simplistic in the presence of a multitude of cooling options and optimizations. In response to the rising cost of energy, the industry introduced modular design in the form of containers to serve as the new building block for data centers. However, it is still unclear how efficient they are compared to raised-floor data centers and under what conditions they are preferred. In this paper, we provide comparative and quantitative analysis of cooling power in both container-based and raised-floor data centers. Our results show that a container achieves 80% and 42% savings in cooling and facility powers respectively compared to a raised-floor data center and that savings of 41% in cooling power are possible when workloads are consolidated onto the least number of containers. We also show that cooling optimizations are not very effective at high utilizations; and that a raised-floor data center can approach the efficiency of a container at low utilizations when employing a simple cooling optimization.