Over the past decade, the increasing complexity of data-intensive cloud computing services along with the exponential growth of their demands in terms of computational resources and communication bandwidth presented significant challenges to be addressed by the scientific research community. Relevant concerns have specifically arisen for the massive amount of energy necessary for operating, connecting, and maintaining the thousands of data centres supporting cloud computing services, as well as for their drastic impact on the environment in terms of increased carbon footprint. This chapter provides a survey of the most popular energy-conservation and “green” technologies that can be applied at data centre and network level in order to overcome these issues. After introducing the reader to the general problem of energy consumption in cloud computing services, the authors illustrate the state-of-the-art strategies for the development of energy-efficient data centres; specifically, they discuss principles and best practices for energy-efficient data centre design focusing on hardware, power supply specifications, and cooling infrastructure. The authors further consider the problem from the perspective of the network energy consumption, analysing several approaches achieving power efficiency for access, and core networks. Additionally, they provide an insight to recent development in energy-efficient virtual machine placement and dynamic load balancing. Finally, the authors conclude the chapter by providing the reader with a novel research work for the establishment of energy-efficient lightpaths in computational grids.
Energy-efficient data centres : model-based analysis of power-performance trade-offs