The IT industry is the fastest growing sector in US energy

consumption. Improving data center energy efficiency

is a pressing issue with significant economic and environmental

consequences. Heat distribution is a key operational

parameter that affects data center cooling and energy consumption.

However, typical data centers lack effective finegrained

sensing systems to monitor heat distribution at a

large scale. In this paper, we motivate the use of sensor networks

as a dense instrumentation technology to understand

and control cooling in data centers. We present Microsoft

Research Genomote sensors designed for data center monitoring,

and the RACNet for reliable data acquisition. We

describe lessons learned from early pilot deployments, and

discuss architectural and technical challenges in developing

data center sensor networks.

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In  The Fifth Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (HotEmNets 2008)

Publisher  Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
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