Development of a divided zone method for power savings in a data center

The number of data centers has increased continuously in recent years. The power required for a data center to cool its Information Technology (IT) equipment is typically approximately 35%~45% of the data center's power consumption. In this study, a divided zone method is developed to improve the cooling efficiency for a data center. A divided zone partition can concentrate airflow for key components to avoid airflow bypass and to control different individual zones independently when a Fan Speed Control (FSC) is implemented for the system. At the server level, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) case study of a 1U server will be compared with and without the partition at an ambient temperature of 35°C. In the server system, the divided zone partition introduces the benefit of one specific zone to avoid airflow bypass and gain power savings. The partition can save 32.6% of the total fan power consumption and reduce the system airflow rate by 13.8%, which can also relieve the CRAH blower load. For a specific load change in the server, the FSC function can save 31.4% of the fan power consumption when the CPU load is decreased from 95 W to 76 W. Power savings can be enhanced from 31.4% to 46.8% after implementing the divided zone partition with a FSC function. Obviously, the divided zone partition can introduce extra cooling efficiency to save more power. When the divided zone method is applied in a data center room, it may enhance the server operating airflow by 39% for a specific 30% loading rack. In general, the utilization of a divided zone partition shows a significant power savings for IT equipment from the server level to the data center level.