Communication-Awareness for Energy-Efficiency in Datacenters

Abstract

Abstract With the proliferation of cloud computing concept, the datacenters, as the basic infrastructure for cloud computing, have gained an ever-growing attention during the last decade. Energy consumption in datacenters is one of the several features of them that have been the target of various researches. Two major consumers of energy in datacenters are the cooling system and IT equipment. Computing resources, such as servers, and communicating ones, such as switches, constitute the main portion of IT equipment. Among these two major players, the servers have been considered more than networking equipment. Making servers energy proportional as well as server consolidation are the two essential approaches regarding reduction of servers’ energy consumption. However, some researches indicate that 10–20% of energy consumption of IT equipment goes to network equipment and hence they must also be considered en route to better energy consumption in datacenters. The focus of this chapter is energy consumption of network equipment in datacenters and conducted researches in this area. First, a quick summary about network energy consumption in datacenters is presented. After that, related state of the art approaches and techniques are categorized, reviewed, and discussed. Finally, the chapter is concluded with presentation of recent original work of authors and its details.