Energy-Efficient Design of Data Center Spaces in the Era of IoT Exploiting the Concept of Digital Twins

Research on the power management of server units and server room spaces can ease the installation of a Data Center, inferring cost reduction, and environmental protection for its operation. This type of research focuses either on the restriction of power consumption of the devices of a data center, or on the minimization of energy exchange between the data center space as a whole and its environment. The work presented here focuses mainly on the latter. In particular, we attempt to estimate the effect that can infer on the energy performance of a data room, various interventions on the structural envelop of the building that hosts the data center. The performance of the data center is evaluated in this work by measuring its PUE index. Our modeling methodology includes the selection of a proper simulation tool for the creation of the digital twin, that is of a digital clone, of our real data center, and then building its thermal model via energy measurements. In this work, the researchers exploit the potential of EnergyPlus software for modelling and simulating the behavior of a data center space. The energy measurements were conducted for a long period, using low cost IoT infrastructure, in the data center space of an Educational building in Heraklion Crete. This paper describes the procedures and the results of this work.