Towards data center self-diagnosis using a mobile robot

We describe an inexpensive robot that serves as a physical autonomic element, capable of navigating, mapping and monitoring data centers with little or no human involvement, 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 management at the level of the data center as a whole, particularly self-diagnosis of emerging thermal problems. © 2011 ACM.