A Brief Overview of Recent Developments in Thermal Management in Data Centers

Data centers are mission critical facilities that typically contain thousands of data processing equipment, such as servers, switches, and routers. In recent years, there has been a boom in data center usage, leading their energy consumption to grow by about 10% a year continuously. The heat generated in these data centers must be removed so as to prevent high temperatures from degrading their reliability, which would cost additional energy. Therefore, precise and reliable thermal management of the data center environment is critical. This paper focuses on recent advancements in data center modeling and energy optimization. A number of currently available and developmental thermal management technology in data centers are broadly reviewed. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for raised-floor data centers, experimental measurements, containment systems, economizer cooling, hybrid cooling, and device level cooling are all thoroughly reviewed. The paper concludes with a summary and presents areas of potential future research, which are based on the holistic integration of workload prediction and allocation, and thermal management using smart control systems.