Energy Efficiency in Data Center Management

Abstract

The availability of the internet and exponential growth of IoT devices has provided organizations with advanced capabilities to facilitate and provide services. With these capabilities comes new demands. These demands are met using vast amounts of equipment and power to help support these new advances. A Data Center is a physical building that houses the hardware that provides this support. Some of the equipment one might find in a data center includes but is not limited to networking equipment, storage equipment and much more. The size of these centers varies depending on the size of the organization they serve. The data center performs various functions such as data storage, management, backup and recovery. Other functions include application management and hosting, hosting network-based transactions such as e-commerce and more. These centers provide vast amounts of capabilities, but they too require vast amounts of resources and energy to run. The amount of energy and resources that these facilities require is constantly increasing in line with the expanding demand for data storage and processing. Due to the impact this demand has on the environment and the pressing need for sustainable energy solutions, the amount of energy that data centers consume has emerged as a major source of concern for governments, businesses, and environmental organizations. Due to both exponential growth of data centers and complexity of power grids, the environmental impact of continued data growth remains uncertain and should be assumed to be severe. Companies are looking into a wide variety of potential solutions in order to satisfy the requirements that data centers place on them in terms of energy and resources. One strategy for providing power to data centers is to make use of renewable energy sources like the sun, wind, and hydropower. This not only helps to reduce the facilities' overall carbon footprint but also 2 contributes to cost savings in the area of energy. In addition, many data centers are currently in the process of reducing their overall energy consumption by implementing energy-efficient technologies such as server consolidation and virtualization.