Sustainable data centers: Enabled by supply and demand side management

The environmental impact of data centers is significant and is growing rapidly. Servers alone in the US consumed 1.2% of the nation´s energy in 2005, according to the EPA. In the following year, the EPA found that the cost of energy rose by 10%. However, there are many opportunities for greater efficiency through integrated design and management of data center components. To that end, we propose a sustainable data center that replaces conventional resource delivery models with a framework centered around the supply and demand side management of all data center resources including IT, power and cooling. We have identified five elements for achieving this vision: data center scale lifecycle design, flexible and configurable building blocks, pervasive cross-layer sensing, knowledge discovery and visualization, and autonomous control. We describe these principles and provide selected results that quantify the potential for savings.