Green data center

The presence of computing in our society is enormous, and the trend continues. While organizations around the world rely more and more indispensably on their data centers to protect their fast growing data and information, the energy consumption of data center is becoming a key environmental, social, and political issue. Therefore, it is very important to minimize the energy usage by data centers. Green data centers refer to energy-aware data center design rationale of minimized carbon footprint. Virtualization has become a revolutionizing technology for systematic design and deployment of green data centers. This chapter presents a comprehensive study of green data centers. First, the concept and basic systems configuration of energy-efficient data centers are introduced. Then, an elaborative collection of greenness metrics are discussed for profiling the energy issues of green data centers. Next, the state-of-the-art energy-aware techniques are presented for the design and deployment of green data centers. Finally, the challenges and the future directions are pointed out.