Technology has pervaded every sphere of life to make it simpler and easier. This has increased the impact of human activities on the environment. There is an urgent need to mitigate the influences and promote sustainable development for our future generations. Green technology is one such step. A data center is a network of computer servers used by an organization to either save, process or distribute large amounts of data. A green data center is a repository of data where electrical, mechanical, lighting and computer systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact (“Building the Green Data Center”, 2008). Nowadays, green technology is used in data centers to make organizations, eco-friendly and save on costs incurred by these huge data centers.
Uddin and Rahman (2011) discuss that about 30% of the servers in a data center network are dead and do not perform any useful work but consume a lot of energy. A virtualization technique can be implemented for cost effective and energy efficient data centers. The resources available to a university are limited and must be exploited in the best possible way to ensure better results with minimum cost and less power usage. A data center has many equipment like storage devices, servers, chillers, generators and cooling towers. As the data in the university increases, these devices also increase in number. This leads to increased energy consumption and emission of hazardous greenhouse gases (Uddin and Rahman, 2011). The goal of the virtualization technology is to combine or divide the server based environment in large organizations like a university. It makes use of virtual machines or hypervisor system which enables two or more operating systems to be installed on one physical machine. Such systems also share hardware resources and other system software. This reduces the overall equipment cost of the data center and restricts the heat generated by employing a large number of devices. It is a greener way of using data centers as it diminishes the carbon dioxide levels emitted by these centers.
Electricity consumption and waste output are two major areas of concern for any big organization. Standard metrics need to be created for data center operators to measure and assess their consumption and performance (“Building the Green Data center”, 2008). State and local regulations must be followed while assessing energy consumption and estimating waste production. The main problem is that expenses for data center power has not been tightly coupled with data center performance (“Building the Green Data center”, 2008). According to Uptime research, 60% of the power used to cool the equipment in data centers are totally wasted (“Building the Green Data Center”, 2008). Another major area of concern is that tools for reducing the energy consumption of data centers and modelling its power requirements are not widely available. Data managers must incorporate energy efficient components in storage systems and cooling equipment.
Possible Solutions for Green Data Center
According to experts in the industry, implementation of a green data center should begin from fixing whatever can be. The focus should be on cooling, airflow and equipment placement to optimize existing space ("Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit 2014", 2014). Developing data center management skills are vital for migrating towards a greener technology. It will foster thinking and help in the development of an overarching strategy. Cost optimization and providing a value added service to end user should be at the core for any IT service provider ("Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit 2014", 2014). Data center infrastructure management can lead to the achievement of this goal involving less energy consumption and minimum hazardous gas emission.
The waste produced by data centers has put the environment at great risk today. The critical issues for planning, building, managing and government collaborations need to be urgently addressed (“Data Center Summit Roadmap to a Cloud-Based Infrastructure”, 2013). High demand workloads and the explosion of data growth have lead data centers reach their maximum capacity. To keep up the performance and meet growing demands, data center needs to undergo a transformation phase (“Data Center Summit Roadmap to a Cloud-Based Infrastructure”, 2013). Optimizing data center efficiency can be achieved by a number of ways like strategy, technology decision making, opting for internal and external cloud storage to reduce the load and hence the waste.
Challenges in green data center technology
With the immense growth in data, organizations invest a heavy amount for building data center infrastructure and then eventually run out of the cost and space (“Green Data Center Methodology”, n.d.). This has two negative effects:
It unnecessarily increases the cost of infrastructure
Data centers consume a lot of energy. A huge data center will have high power consumption and will lead to high energy wastage.
A solution which keeps the data storage needs low and at the same time promotes energy saving and less waste production in the form of greenhouse gases is needed (“Green Data Center Methodology”, n.d.).
HCL proposes a green data center methodology which can be implemented in either top down approach or bottom up approach. It focusses on development of green workplace and green business processes. The main objective of implementing enterprise wide green goals is to not only reduce energy usage and limit carbon footprints, but, to provide greater opportunities and make business processes leaner and easier (“Green Data Center Methodology”, n.d.).
The Green data center methodology presented by HCL involves following steps:
Planning and design phase, which involves designing a detailed roadmap for green initiatives like DC optimization, green procurement, recycling and financial and resource planning.
Implementation phase, which includes choosing technologies for data center consolidation, virtualization, power and cooling management.
This strategy would help an organization become a green data center enterprise and will effectively lower the costs of their data center waste management and power consumption.
Energy efficiency can be increased in two ways (“Simple Steps to Green Data Centres”, 2012):
Find cheaper ways to cool servers and limit power used with chillers and cooling towers.
Adapt the system to match the amount of data center capacity currently in use to prevent wastage.
The data center is designed to work in full load, but mostly use only a fraction of their load. A tool which lets a data center use only the amount of energy as per the current storage can be a revolution in green data center technology (“Simple Steps to Green Data Centres”, 2012)
Sari and Akkaya (2015) emphasize the importance of maintaining the same performance metric for data centers and simultaneously using a technology to optimize energy requirements and minimize carbon dioxide emissions. Green computing will not only reduce costs and emissions, but will provide operational benefits as well. The greatest challenge in implementing green data center is the divergence between the expected computational performance of the server and lack of methods and tools to increase the energy efficiency of the system (Sari and Akkaya, 2015). Another challenge is that efficiency of the data center is measured using its carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) which relates to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. The use of green technology will enable data centers to generate power through eco-friendly methods, thereby reducing carbon emissions and its impact on the environment. Using liquid cooling techniques, fresh air technology or ice storage systems to reduce the load on chillers and minimize power consumption are some of the steps towards a greener data center. The virtualization software can significantly reduce the energy usage of servers and optimize the energy needs of a data center (Sari and Akkaya, 2015).
References
(2016). In Green Data Center Conference. San Diego, CA. Retrieved from http://www.greendatacenterconference.com/
(2013). In DataCenter Summit Roadmap to a Cloud-Based Infrastructure. Singapore. Retrieved from http://www.questexevent.com/DCS/2013SG/
Bauer, R. (2008). Building the Green Data Center Towards Best Practices and Technical Considerations. Presentation.
Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit 2014. (2014). In Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit 2014. London. Retrieved from http://www.gartner.com/binaries//content/assets/events/keywords/data-center/lsce11/dc14_trip_report_1.pdf
Green Data Center Solutions & Services | HCL Technologies. (2016). Hcltech.com. Retrieved 16 March 2016, from http://www.hcltech.com/it-infrastructure-management/green-datacenter-methodology
Sari, A., & Akkaya, M. (2015). Security and Optimization Challenges of Green Data Centers. IJCNS, 08(12), 492-500. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ijcns.2015.812044
Simple Steps to Green Data Centres - SynapSense. (2012). Synapsense.com. Retrieved 16 March 2016, from http://www.synapsense.com/simple-steps-to-green-data-centres/
The Efficient, Green Data Center. (2008) (1st ed.). Retrieved from http://www.emc.com/collateral/emc-perspective/h5843-green-data-ctr-ep.pdf
Uddin, M., & Abdul, A. (2011). Virtualization Implementation Model for Cost Effective & Efficient Data Centers. International Journal Of Advanced Computer Science And Applications, 2(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/ijacsa.2011.020110
