Energy-efficient approaches to Cloud computing

Enterprises are looking forward to adopt cutting edge innovative technologies that could cut costs and maximize value. Cloud is getting into every Business, Industry and Enterprise applications ensuring economic and agility benefits. While Cloud seems to be disruptive, it´s still a long way to go to completely materialize the Cloud. Cloud computing envisions that services, platforms and computing resources can be provided, on-demand, in a self-service fashion by a set of cooperating and/or competing providers to clients over the Internet. The emergence of cloud computing stems from the availability of numerous massive data centers, improvements in virtualization technologies and the availability and abundance of high speed networks. A large-scale computing infrastructure consumes enormous amounts of electrical power leading to operational costs not only exceed the cost of the infrastructure, also reflects on its carbon footprint. Green Cloud computing solution is needed that saves energy for the environment. This paper surveys techniques and solutions that aim to improve the energy efficiency of computing resources. It discusses methods to evaluate and model the energy consumed by these resources, and describes techniques that operate at a distributed system level, trying to improve aspects such as resource allocation.