Siemens Inventors of the Year Award 2015

No heat build-up in data centers: Dr. Pornsak Songkakul‘s software unites building automation and IT management, pushing down the cost of cooling server rooms. Dr. Songkakul, who at Building Technologies in the United States, has just been honored as a “Siemens Inventor of the Year” for his creative achievements. Siemens has been presenting the Inventors of the Year Awards annually since 1995 to honor the organization's outstanding researchers and developers whose inventions make major contributions to the company's success.

The greater the volume of data a server processes, the more heat it generates. That is why data centers consume a lot of energy to keep their operating rooms cool. Now, an invention by Dr. Pornsak Songkakul (57) can determine at precisely which server racks the ambient temperature is already elevated. Then the server management system is advised to automatically transfer new computing loads to servers located in the area where the ambient temperature is deemed most suitable to handle new heating load. This smart building automation technology can reduce the enormous amount of energy consumed by data centers. Sensors measure the temperature at multiple locations in the server rooms, even directly at the racks. His patents are among the first to address interfaces between the building automation system and the server management system.

The patented techniques will be offered to data center customers in the very near future and he reckons they will increase reliability of server operation while at the same time reduce energy costs. The amount of the energy reduction will depend heavily on the size and the age of the data centers.