Capacity Planning for Green Data Center Sustainability

Abstract

Business demands for powerful computing resources are increasing the workload in data centers, hence raising the complexity in managing the data center. The impact of data centers on the environment is now a particular concern. Although there are now efforts to realize Green data centers through harnessing Green technologies, their sustainability still remains an issue. Data center management includes planning its capacity. However, capacity planning for data center efficiency has only focused on measurements of power and cooling (part of infrastructure operation), which are insufficient to ensure the sustainability of the data center. In fact, a more thorough set of components must be considered. Therefore, this study proposes a capacity planning framework to derive practical solutions for Green data center management and thus ensure the sustainability of the Green data center. To this end, the components for Green data center sustainability and capacity planning were determined using Content Analysis and the findings verified by Green data center experts.