Green Energy in Data Centers

Green Energy in Data Centers

Kanahavalli Mardamutu, Vasaki Ponnusamy, Noor Zaman
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-3817-2.ch019
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Abstract

Green energy paradigm has been gaining popularity in the computing system from the software, hardware, infrastructure and application perspectives. Within that concept, data center greening is of utmost importance at the moment since data centers are one of the most energy conserving elements. Data centers are seen as the technology era's black energy-swallowing secret. Reducing energy consumption at data centers can reduce carbon footprint effect tremendously. Not addressing the issue immediately will lead to significant energy usage by data centers and will hinder the growth of data centers. The call for sustainable energy efficient data center leads to venturing into data center green computing. The green computing concept can be achieved by using several methods adopted by researchers including renewable energy, virtualization through cloud computing, proper cooling system, identifying suitable location to harvest energy whilst reducing the need for air-conditioning and employing suitable networking and information technology infrastructure. This paper focuses into several approaches used by researches to reduce energy consumption at data centers while deploying efficient database management system. This paper differs from others in the literature by giving some suitable solutions by looking into a hybrid model for green computing in data centers.
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Problem Statement

In today’s technological world, it is proven that there is a significant relationship between data center and investment in capital overlay and outgoing costs. Table 1 shows the detailed breakdown on the distribution of the cost from data center (Greenberg et al., 2008).

The design of computing system is being optimized based on the execution time and operates at low consumption due to entrapment of resources and fragmentation of data. No concern was made for the issue of energy consumption by the system. Uncontrolled usage of energy in data centers has negative effects on the reliability, density, scalability of information processing and the environment. Need and awareness are raised across nation through multiple solution and disciplines to optimize and save energy use in data management system (Barroso. L.A, 2005). System or even its components like CPUs, memory and disk are hardly distributing energy efficiently. It trades power for performance (US Department, 2013). Power management has become a critical issue due to large energy usage and all over the world government has started imposing the taxes on the carbon emission, ultimately aiming to reduce the emission and help make computing into green computing (Bansal et al., 2011).

Although research was conducted in designing power aware applications, an effort for implementing has not been taken place. Large expenses and allocations need to be augmented when data center reaches maximum provisioned power (Bansal et al., 2011). In the very near future, energy efficiency is expected to be one of the key procuring arguments in the society. Research should focus in building power-aware database management systems (DBMS) or GreenDB.

Table 1.
Guide on the distribution of data center costs
Amortized CostComponentSub-Component
~ 45%ServersCPU, memory, storage systems.
~ 25%InfrastructurePower distribution and cooling.
~15%Power drawElectrical utility costs.
~15%NetworkLinks, transit, equipment.

a. Source of data: A. Greenberg et al, “The cost of a cloud: research problems in data center networks”, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 39(1), pp. 68, 2008

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