A survey of research on greening data centers

The growing economical and environmental cost of data centers due to the high energy consumption is becoming a major issue. “Green Data Centers” refers to, energy aware, energy efficient and CO2 emission minimizing designs, protocols, devices, infrastructures and algorithms for data centers. Today´s data centers are provisioned for peak load. However, it is shown that servers are idle most of the time. Idle servers and the connected network elements are consuming considerable amount of energy. In this survey, we identify the key enablers of green data center research. Firstly we overview the green metrics that are applicable to data centers. Then we describe the most recent stage of research and give a taxonomy of the related work. We focus on computing and networking proposals for green data centers, even though we briefly describe some other green research related to data centers such as cloud computing, cooling.