Sensing data centres for energy efficiency

Data centres are large energy consumers today, and their consumption is expected to increase further, driven by the growth in cloud services. The large monetary cost and the environmental impact of this consumption have motivated operators to optimize data centre management. We argue that one of the underlying reasons for the low-energy utilization is the lack of visibility into a data centre's highly dynamic operating conditions. Wireless sensor networks promise to remove this veil of uncertainty by delivering large volumes of data collected at high spatial and temporal fidelities. The paper summarizes data centre operations in order to describe the parameters that a data centre sensing network should collect and motivate the challenges that such a network faces. We present technical approaches for the problems of data collection and management and close with an overview of a data centre genome, an end-to-end data centre sensing system.