Abstract
The demand for and on data centers continue to pose several power, cooling, and performance constraints associated with operational, economic and environmental inefficiency. Sensor Based Information Systems (SBIS) are one of the best practices for addressing these constraints. The aim of the paper is to review the research on the applications of SBIS in data centers and discusses the opportunities for utilizing SBIS to support the business functions of the data centers including the management of cooling, power delivery and computing platforms. Although the use of sensors to monitor temperature, smoke, heat and security is considered an old practice in data centers, the full utilization and integration of these sensors into information systems to automate data centre management functions, inform decision making in data centre management and transform data centers to improve their operational, economic and environmental performance appears to be very limited. The paper reviews the current literature and concludes that there is a dearth for empirical studies that focus on the use of SBIS and the benefits of SBIS to the data centers. Thus, the paper calls for more theoretical and empirical research to investigate the utilization of SBIS to manage data centers’ platforms and its impact on data centers performance.