IBM, like most data center providers, combats the delicate balance of properly maintaining its servers with a temperature and humidity controlled environment, and being energy-efficient. Data centers alone consume approximately 2%of the United States? electricity budget. Common issues of hot spots are soon to be fixed, thanks to IBM?s uncommon solution?a Roomba. Well, an iRobot Create, the robot vacuum?s customizable cousin.
Fitted with a sensor and webcam mounted pole, the several robots in IBM?s fleet autonomously navigate a select few of the company?s 400 centers. ?We currently have 11 production robots deployed in four continents, nine of which are at IBM data centers and two of which are used for customer engagements,? IBM researcher Jonathan Lenchner elaborates. ?We expect to have a few more robots deployed by the end of this year.?
As they maneuver, the robots plot the temperature and humidity throughout, compiling maps with temperature signatures so any trouble spots can be addressed and energy saved. Prior to this iRobot creation, IBM monitored their energy output with manually operated (and time-consuming) carts. Aside from easing and streamlining this process with the robots, IBM?s development offers a neat and cost-effective solution to a widespread problem. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends data centers maintain their temperatures somewhere between 64 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, but even this suggestion proves too broad for very tech specific servers. IBM?s robots are poised to eliminate much of these wild fluctuations in the environment.
A surprisingly similar solution has come out of EMC in India, with an iRobot Create as the base and the monitoring structure almost identical to IBM?s. According to all reports, the concepts were developed individually and manufactured separately. Lenchner and his team at IBM are confident their robot is more fully realized at this point, but the project report on EMC?s blog calculates their materials costs (minus the laptop used to gather the temperature map) totaled $200. While these projects ultimately return similar results, the common use of the iRobot Create certainly demonstrates its reputation as a prefab, customizable base for a variety of projects.
Heat mapping is just the beginning for IBM?s creation?already in the works: radio-frequency identification. ?As it navigates the data center it also reads the RFID tags on the equipment and thereby locates the individual servers, storage and networking equipment quite precisely, and much more inexpensively than if one were to put RFID readers in each rack, which is the common practice today,? said Lenchner. However, this next step isn?t quite production-ready yet.
It is a step toward fully automated data centers, manned by robots, which has been buzzing in the industry recently. Already, robots for security patrols and basic environmental monitoring are on the market. But maybe with more of IBM?s research and development, data centers will rely on robots entirely for operation?and vacuuming.
