Building a WSN infrastructure with COTS components for the thermal monitoring of datacenters

Our society has become ever more dependent on large datacenters. Search engines, e-commerce and cloud computing are just some of the broadly used services that rely on large scale datacenters. Datacenter managers are reluctant to non-functional changes on the facilities of a perfectly operational installation as failures can be very expensive. Therefore, one of the big challenges of green computing is how to reduce the energy consumption and environmental impact of such systems without compromising the business. In this work, we propose a thermal monitoring tool for datacenters which is based on a WSN composed of ready-to-use modules. This tool provides a better understanding of the thermal behavior of datacenters and can help datacenter managers, for example, to manually adjust the cooling system in order to avoid energy waste and reduce cost. There is very low intrusiveness to the server facilities, as the tool is 100% independent of the server operability and requires only the setup of small wireless and battery powered sensors. Our tool was implemented and tested on a real datacenter in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.