Energy and Heat-Aware Metrics for Data Centers: Metrics Analysis in the Framework of CoolEmAll Project

CoolEmAll project aims at improving energy-efficiency of data centers. The main results of CoolEmAll include data center Simulation, Visualization and Decision tools (SVD Toolkit) and models of Data Center Efficiency Building Blocks (DEBBs). The resulting tools of CoolEmAll will permit planners and operators of data centers to carry out flexible and fast simulations to minimize the energy consumption on it and to reduce the associated greenhouse gas emissions. Several metrics have been proposed to assess the energy efficiency on data centers on the framework of CoolEmAll project. Unlike the common metrics on data center industry, the ones proposed in this project are focused not only on power consumption but also on dynamic heat-aware analysis. New metrics developed on CoolEmAll are (a) the Imbalance of Temperature of node, group of nodes and racks and (b) Rack Cooling Index adapted to a group of nodes. Node is defined as the smallest element of a data center to be modeled. This approach will permit to detect the cooling requirements and its source in order to implement strategies to reduce that energy demand. The paper describes the selected metrics and the results obtained on the CoolEmAll first prototype experimental tests.