Microsoft's Global Foundation Services division, which oversees the platform the company uses to provide its online services, is deploying a wireless sensor network intended to bring visibility into the firm's data centers and reduce energy wasted in keeping a large room of IT equipment cooler than necessary. The system, developed by the company's Microsoft Research division, was first tested in 2006 and is now being installed at Microsoft's data centers worldwide.
The project, known as Data Center Genome (DC Genome), began with testing a few sensors in a Microsoft data center in 2006. Today, it amounts to more than 700 sensors that the company has been gradually installing, tracking temperatures on individual racks and shelves within its data centers worldwide, thus allowing Microsoft to see the temperature or humidity around each rack of servers.
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