Recent Trends in Green Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is a ubiquitous technology which is spreading its roots in every sphere of modern computing. The benefits of these services are top-notch, but the data centers that power these services consume a huge amount of energy and pose serious threats to the environment due to the increase in carbon footprint. This stems the need to shift to green cloud computing, a crucial area of research these days. Green cloud computing provides a methodology for energy management, recycling, efficient cooling, load balancing, and virtualization of servers. We have reviewed potential domains to tackle the problems that the growth of cloud computing brings along, including underutilized resources like traditional DBMS servers and high energy consumption by processors, servers, and cooling infrastructure. Along with the advantages, we have mentioned some of the disadvantages of the techniques as well. However, these disadvantages are not a major concern for the large-scale implementation of these methods. Once implemented, they are bound to alleviate the problem of hefty energy consumption and growing carbon footprint of the cloud data centers. We have also discussed various parameters which can be used to compute the power consumption by the data centers and also to quantify the green energy coefficient of the cloud services.