A systematic review of green-aware management techniques for sustainable data center

Abstract

Cloud computing is one of the powerful engines driving global industrial upgrading and the booming digital economy. However, the explosive growth of cloud data centers (DCs) has resulted in inevitable energy consumption and carbon emission problems. Therefore, constructing energy-efficient and sustainable DCs will be essential for green cloud computing. This review makes several efforts to thoroughly investigate and track the research progress and routes to sustainable DCs. Firstly, we construct a new conceptual model of sustainable DCs to cover cutting-edge research results and indicate future evolutionary directions. Secondly, this review provides a comprehensive survey of five topics from a technical perspective: workload management, virtual resource management, energy management, thermal management, and waste heat recovery. Subsequently, some real-world datasets relevant to the topics, including workload traces, renewable energy data, and electricity price traces, have been specifically collected to support researchers in conducting further research. Finally, based on observations of existing works, we highlight some salient technical challenges and promising solutions to provide sensible energy and carbon reduction suggestions in sustainable DCs.