Data centers are computing infrastructure facilities that house arrays of electronic racks containing high power dissipation data processing and storage equipment whose temperature must be maintained within allowable limits. In this research, the sustainable and reliable operations of the electronic equipment in data centers are shown to be possible through the Open Engineering Systems paradigm. A design approach is developed to bring adaptability and robustness, two main features of open systems, in multi-scale convective systems such as data centers. The presented approach is centered on the integration of three constructs: a) Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) based multi-scale modeling, b) compromise Decision Support Problem (cDSP), and c) robust design to overcome the challenges in thermal-fluid modeling, having multiple objectives, and inherent variability management, respectively. Two new POD based reduced order thermal modeling methods are presented to simulate multi-parameter dependent temperature field in multi-scale thermal/fluid systems such as data centers. The methods are verified to achieve an adaptable, robust, and energy efficient thermal design of an air-cooled data center cell with an annual increase in the power consumption for the next ten years. Also, a simpler reduced order modeling approach centered on POD technique with modal coefficient interpolation is validated against experimental measurements in an operational data center facility.