Towards the design and operation of net-zero energy data centers

Abstract

Reduction of resource consumption in data centers is becoming a growing concern for data center designers, operators and users. Accordingly, interest in the use of renewable energy to provide some portion of a data center's overall energy usage is also growing. One key concern is that the amount of renewable energy necessary to satisfy a typical data center's power consumption can lead to prohibitively high capital costs for the power generation and delivery infrastructure, particularly if on-site renewables are used. In this paper, we introduce a method to operate a data center with renewable energy that minimizes dependence on grid power while minimizing capital cost. We achieve this by integrating data center demand with the availability of resource supplies during operation. We discuss results from the deployment of our method in a production data center.

Green-Aware Virtual Machine Migration Strategy in Sustainable Cloud Computing Environments

“…Arlitt et al [17] defined the "Net-Zero energy" datacenter, which needs on-site renewable generators to offset the usage of power coming from the electricity grid. Deng et al also conducted research on Datacenter Power Supply System (DPSS) and proposed an efficient, online control algorithm SmartDPSS [18] helping to make online decisions in order to fully leverage the available renewable energy and varying electricity prices from the grid markets, for minimum operational cost.…”

Matching renewable energy supply and demand in green datacenters

“…GreenSlot schedules the use of green energy in datacenters to lower brown energy consumption, monetary costs, and environmental impact. Like GreenSlot, [9,[14][15][16] focused on managing batch jobs, whereas [17][18][19][20] considered interactive services or were not willing to delay computations. Batch jobs typically run longer than interactive service requests and often have loose deadlines, thereby increasing the opportunity to exploit green energy.…”

“…Batch jobs typically run longer than interactive service requests and often have loose deadlines, thereby increasing the opportunity to exploit green energy. GreenSlot differs from [14,15,21] as it considers both green energy and brown energy prices in making its decisions. It differs from [15] in other important ways: [15] used only short-term green energy predictions and runs more or fewer batch jobs in arrival order as a function of green energy availability, without explicit deadlines; if green energy runs out, any started jobs are terminated.…”

“…It then goes through the ordered list and schedules (reserves resources for) the jobs into the future (line [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. The key to scheduling each job is computing the energy cost of starting the job at each slot (lines [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. GreenSlot selects the starting slot that will lead to the lowest overall cost for the job (line 25), assuming that: (1) solar energy has zero cost; (2) the cost is infinite for any slot on which the job cannot start (lines [11][12][13][14]; and (3) violating the deadline incurs an extra cost (lines [17][18].…”

Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy

“…They range from proposals to enhance specific aspects of data centers design and operation (for instance, usage of low-power components, energy-aware resource management, and free-cooling solutions) to overall strategies to achieve sustainable data centers, as proposed by Google [43] and HP [14]. This position paper follows the line of those latter approaches and proposes a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers, by using the energy as a driver of the management procedures of the data center.…”