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Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy

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Abstract

Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.

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  1. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Guitart

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Correspondence to Jordi Guitart.

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This work is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain under contract TIN2015-65316-P, by the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2014-SGR-1051, and by the European Commission under FP7-SMARTCITIES-2013 contract 608679 (RenewIT) and FP7-ICT-2013-10 contracts 610874 (ASCETiC) and 610456 (EuroServer).

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Guitart, J. Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy. Computing 99, 597–615 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-016-0501-1

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