Robotic mapping and monitoring of data centers
Christopher Ryan Mansley, Jonathan H. Connell, Canturk Isci, Jonathan Lenchner, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Suzanne McIntosh, Michael A. Schappert · 2011
We describe an inexpensive autonomous robot capable of navigating previously unseen data centers and monitoring key metrics such as air temperature. The robot provides real-time navigation and sensor data to commercial IBM software, thereby enabling real-time generation of the data center layout, a thermal map and other visualizations of energy dynamics. Once it has mapped a data center, the robot can efficiently monitor it for hot spots and other anomalies using intelligent sampling. We demonstrate the robot's effectiveness via experimental studies from two production data centers.