Temperature Optimisation in Data Centres

Raising server inlet temperatures tends to increase the server power consumption due to heightened server fan activity needed to compensate for the warmer air, and to decrease cooling infrastructure power consumption due to less intense and possibly less frequent chiller activity. Relying on primary data from two data centres of a colocation provider in Switzerland, this study succeeds in confirming and quantifying the first effect: In the upper half of the ASHRAE recommended temperature range and slightly above it, i.e., between 23 - 30 °C, the server power consumption correlated positively with the temperature, with a server room-wide temperature sensitivity of 0.35 - 0.5 %/°C. Based on the available data and due to ambivalent results, the study did not succeed in answering which effect is stronger for the entire data centre: the increase in server consumption or the savings in cooling consumption. Whether raising inlet temperatures beyond the ASHRAE upper limit (i.e., 27 °C) yields additional overall benefits thus remains an open question that would be best addressed through controlled experiments. A few pieces of evidence indicate nevertheless that the upper part of the current ASHRAE recommendation (i.e., around 25 - 27 °C) might be the current sweet spot for colocation DCs. The widely used power usage effectiveness (PUE) metric is not at all useful in this context. For practical reasons but semantically wrong, the server fan power consumption is included in the consumption of servers (and thus, of the IT infrastructure) and is thus on the wrong side of the PUE fraction. An inlet temperature raise, which will lead to increased fan consumption, will thus always yield a PUE decrease, irrespective of what happens to the overall data centre power consumption.