Abstract
The power demand (kW) and energy consumption (kWh) of data centers were augmented drastically due to the increased communication and computation needs of IT services. Leveraging demand and energy management within data centers is a necessity. Thanks to the automated ICT infrastructure empowered by the IoT technology, such types of management are becoming more feasible than ever. In this paper, we look at management from two different perspectives: (1) minimization of the overall energy consumption and (2) reduction of peak power demand during demand-response periods. Both perspectives have a positive impact on total cost of ownership for data centers. We exhaustively reviewed the potential mechanisms in data centers that provided flexibilities together with flexible contracts such as green service level and supply-demand agreements. We extended state-of-the-art by introducing the methodological building blocks and foundations of management systems for the above mentioned two perspectives. We validated our results by conducting experiments on a lab-grade scale cloud computing data center at the premises of HPE in Milano. The obtained results support the theoretical model, by highlighting the excellent potential of flexible service level agreements in Green IT: 33% of overall energy savings and 50% of power demand reduction during demand-response periods in the case of data center federation.
Highlights
For the last couple of years, digitization of information has been pervasive in our daily lives, from normal business operations to private social activities
ICT resources in a given data center are over provisioned. This paves the way of optimization through intelligent energy management by either (1) minimizing the number of resources and finding the optimal mapping of resources to the services without violating service level agreement (SLA) or (2) introducing flexibilities on the customer side, and the implementation of flexible SLAs
With the integration of renewables into the power grid and their extremely intermittent behavior, this necessitated a better planning of power generation from supply-side (e.g., distribution system operator (DSO)), so that the generation matches demand and preserves the power grid’s stability
Summary
For the last couple of years, digitization of information has been pervasive in our daily lives, from normal business operations to private social activities. This required the development of an ubiquitous. ICT (Information and Communications Technology) infrastructure with huge data centers consuming power in the magnitude of Mega Watts like the ones used by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo [1,2]. A widely cited comparison is that the ICT sector worldwide uses as much energy as aviation [5], and continues to grow; contributing to a major share of the world’s CO2 emissions.
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