Machine learning examples crop up for data center management

Data centers are an ideal environment for machine learning since there is so much data available, said Christopher Yetman, COO at Vantage Data Centers, a data center services provider in Santa Clara, Calif. There is sensor data at the building and physical level, with servers and network devices generating vast amounts of information about their own operations. Humans have used that data in the past, but not to its fullest potential. There are also sensors that generate data about air pressure, humidity, temperature and supply voltage and typically feed into a programmable logic controller, Yetman said. The data can then trigger specific actions at certain thresholds, like when a room begins to get too warm.