Improving Energy Efficiency in Data Centers and Federated Cloud Environments: Comparison of CoolEmAll and Eco2Clouds Approaches and Metrics

Significant data centers energy footprints and the increase in energy prices have stimulated investigations into possible metrics and methods to define, quantify and improve the energy efficiency of data centers and federated cloud environments. Studies include metrics and analyses from various points of views, that address both design and operation phases. In this paper we present two complementary energy-efficiency optimization approaches covered in the scope of EU projects: CoolEmAll - with focus on building energy efficient data centers, and Eco2Clouds - with focus on energy-efficient cloud-application deployment in federated cloud-environments, and describe metrics applied in these projects to assess and optimize energy-efficiency. Both approaches make use of metrics to assess energy-efficiency of data center- and cloud resources, and energy-costs of application/workload execution for various data center granularity levels and federation-sites.