Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Green and Energy-Efficient Cloud Computing: Part I

Abstract

The papers in this special section focus on green and energy efficient cloud computing. Cloud computing has had a huge commercial impact and has attracted the interest of the research community. Public clouds allow their customers to outsource the management of physical resources, and rent a variable amount of resources in accordance to their specific needs. Private clouds allow companies to manage on-premises resources, exploiting the capabilities offered by the cloud technologies, such as using virtualization to improve resource utilization and cloud software for resource management automation. Hybrid clouds, where private infrastructures are integrated and complemented by external resources, are becoming a common scenario as well, for example to manage load peaks. Cloud applications are hosted by data centers whose size ranges from tens to tens of thousands of servers, which raises significant challenges related to energy and cost management. It has been estimated that the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry alone is responsible for 2-3 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, we must find innovative methods and tools to manage the energy efficiency and carbon footprint of data centers, so that they can operate and scale in a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable manner. These methods and tools are often categorized as Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) to monitor, control, and optimize data centers with extensive automation. DCIM must also effectively manage the quality of service provided by the data center, since cloud customers require high reliability, availability, usability, and low response times.