Using Naturally Cold Air and Snow for Data Center Air-Conditioning and Humidity Control

SUMMARY Reducing power consumption has become a worldwide concern. It is also becoming a more significant issue for computer systems, as reflected by the growing use of software‐as‐a‐service and cloud computing, whose markets have increased since 2000. At the same time, the number of data centers that accumulate and manage computers has increased rapidly. Power consumption at data centers accounts for a big share of the entirety of IT power usage, and is still increasing rapidly. The present research focuses on air conditioning, which accounts for the largest portion of electric power consumption in data centers, and proposes the development of a technique to lower the power consumption by using natural cool air and snow for temperature and humidity control. We verify the effectiveness of this approach through experiments. We also examine the extent to which energy reduction is possible when a data center is located in Hokkaido.