We describe an inexpensive robot that serves as a physical autonomic element, autonomously navigating, mapping and monitoring data centers - even ones that it has never seen before. Through a series of real experiments and simulations, we establish that the robot is sufficiently accurate, efficient and robust to be of practical benefit in real data center environments. We demonstrate how the robot's integration with Maximo for Energy Optimization, a commercial data center energy management product, supports autonomic behaviors at the level of the data center as a whole, particularly self-diagnosis of emerging thermal problems.
By: Jon Lenchner, Canturk Isci, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Christopher Mansley, Jonathan Connell, Suzanne McIntosh
Published in: RC25123 in 2011
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