Abstract

<p>The energy consumed by data centers is starting to make up a significant fraction of the world’s energy consumption and carbon emissions. A large fraction of the consumed en- ergy is spent on data center cooling, which has motivated a large body of work on temperature management in data centers. Interestingly, a key aspect of temperature manage- ment has not been well understood: controlling the setpoint temperature at which to run a data center’s cooling system. Most data centers set their thermostat based on (conserva- tive) suggestions by manufacturers, as there is limited un- derstanding of how higher temperatures will affect the sys- tem. At the same time, studies suggest that increasing the temperature setpoint by just one degree could save 2–5% of the energy consumption.</p> <p>This paper provides a multi-faceted study of temperature management in data centers. We use a large collection of field data from different production environments to study the impact of temperature on hardware reliability, including the reliability of the storage subsystem, the memory subsys- tem and server reliability as a whole. We also use an ex- perimental testbed based on a thermal chamber and a large array of benchmarks to study two other potential issues with higher data center temperatures: the effect on server perfor- mance and power. Based on our findings, we make recom- mendations for temperature management in data centers, that create the potential for saving energy, while limiting negative effects on system reliability and performance.</p>

 

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