Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy

Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas s...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Guitart Fernández, Jordi|||0000-0003-0751-3100
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/97587
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/97587
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00607-016-0501-1
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Data processing service centers -- Energy consumption
Green computing
Energy efficiency
Energy management
Energy measurement
Sustainability
Resource management
Data centers
Centres informàtics -- Consum d'energia
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Arquitectura de computadors
Descripción
Sumario:Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.