Towards greener services in cloud computing: Research and future directives

Cloud computing is today´s most emphasized infrastructure for running high performance computing (HPC), business enterprise and web applications used by almost every online user. The growing demand of distributed powerful data centers has drastically increased the Cloud infrastructure energy consumption, which has started to limit further performance growth not only due to overwhelming electricity bills but also due to carbon dioxide footprint that effect the whole world. Therefore, energy-efficient solutions have become a challenging factor for the ICT future sustainability. To design such solutions, deep analysis of the Cloud infrastructure and the computing resources that contribute to energy consumption is required. This paper discusses various elements that form the cloud computing environment, its role in the total energy consumption and the research directions to enable green Cloud computing. Finally, an energy efficient green Cloud architecture is proposed to provide a unified solution that assists Clouds providers to utilize computing resources in the greenest or most energy-efficient way.