Air-conditioning equipment accounts for about 30% of data center electricity consumption. Making air-conditioning equipment more energy-efficient is accordingly a major aspect of reducing the environmental footprint of data centers.(

NTT Energy and Environment Systems Laboratories (NTT EESL) is developing data center energy management systems (DEMS) for optimizing data center energy supply and demand by enabling centralized management and sophisticated cooperative control of server and other ICT equipment load and air conditioning equipment operation status.

In joint research with NTT FACILITIES carried out in fiscal 2012, NTT EESL used a DEMS to achieve power savings of over 18% through the cooperative control of multiple air-conditioning units. NTT is working on the drafting of an ITU-T recommendation for DEMS, and is examining the effectiveness of DEMS in multi-vendor environments and how to best balance reliability and safety with efficiency, with the aim of bringing out a commercial DEMS by the end of 2014.