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 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.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Power Consumption and Carbon Emission Equivalent for Virtualized Resources – An Analysis: Virtual Machine and Container Analysis for Greener Data Center

The International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that the worldwide energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) situation has hit a historic high of 33.1 Giga tonnes (Gt) of CO2. 85% of the rise in emissions was due to China, India, and the United States. The increase in emissions in India was 4.8%, or 105 Mega tonnes (Mt) of CO2, with the increase in emissions being evenly distributed across the transportation and industrial sectors, according to Beloglazov et al (2011). Environmental contamination brought on by carbon emissions is harmful to the environment. As a result, there is an urgent need for the IT sectors to develop effective and efficient technology to eliminate such carbon emissions. The primary focus is on lowering carbon emissions due to widespread awareness of the issue

A survey on energy efficiency in information systems

Concerns about energy and sustainability are growing everyday involving a wide range of fields. Even Information Systems (ISs) are being influenced by the issue of reducing pollution and energy consumption and new fields are rising dealing with this topic. One of these fields is Green Information Technology (IT), which deals with energy efficiency with a focus on IT. Researchers have faced this problem according to several points of view. The purpose of this paper is to understand the trends and the future development of Green IT by analyzing the state-of-the-art and classifying existing approaches to understand which are the components that have an impact on energy efficiency in ISs and how this impact can be reduced. At first, we explore some guidelines that can help to understand the efficiency level of an organization and of an IS. Then, we discuss measurement and estimation of energy efficiency and identify which are the components that mainly contribute to energy waste and how it is possible to improve energy efficiency, both at the hardware and at the software level

Towards Carbon-Aware Spatial Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

Carbon-aware spatial computing (CASC) is focused on reducing the carbon footprint of spatial computing itself and leveraging spatial computing techniques to minimize carbon emissions in other domains. The significance of CASC lies in its potential to mitigate anthropogenic climate change by offering numerous societal applications, such as carbon-aware supply chain development and carbon-aware site selection. CASC is challenging because of the spatiotemporal variability and the high dimensionality of carbon emissions data, involving spatial coordinates and timestamps. Related work, known as carbon-aware computing, mostly focuses on job scheduling of cloud computing, and there is a lack of surveys and review papers detailing the potential of CASC on variant domains and applications. In this paper, we provide the vision of CASC by proposing a taxonomy of sub-domains within CASC and introducing ideas beyond job scheduling, such as carbon-smart site selection. We also briefly review the literature in selected sub-domains and highlight research challenges and opportunities. Given the societal importance of the topic, we encourage the scientific community to use this brief survey to expand the field of study into other related sub-domains and advance CASC more broadly