Green Data Center Frameworks and Guidelines Review

Abstract

Our world today are getting more attach to the technology especially IT. Behind every superb applications that we rely on everyday are data centers where all the processing activities reside. Data centers as the heart of computing gained its magnitude and vitality through the emergence of internet services. The intense workload of data centers in order to fulfill customers need indirectly contributed to world pollution through massive usage of electricity. Thus an energy efficient framework for steering the data centers design and management is needed. Besides the green factor, the framework should take into consideration total cost of ownership (TCO) as one of the key components to make it budget friendly and feasible to all kind of budget. To achieve this, a comparison on 10 existing energy efficient data center frameworks and guidelines was performed. The comparison deduced that the frameworks have the opportunities for improvement in term of components, attributes, energy efficient metrics and implementation methodology. Free of charge (FOC) green initiatives extracted from the existing frameworks and guidelines could shed some light on green embracement by every data center regarding of their size, capability and fund allocation. Categorization of attributes based on return on investment (ROI) and energy efficiency level in one of the frameworks that allows it to be implemented in phases is a sensible and practical approach. Propositions and novel ideas from industry leaders such as Google and Facebook are also gathered to provide diverse views on energy efficiency approaches and opportunities in data centers.