Sources of variability in data center lifecycle assessment

As large consolidated data centers and cloud computing infrastructures proliferate worldwide in response to the continued global demand for information technology (IT) applications, there has been a renewed interest in understanding the environmental impacts of the data centers housing these IT services. A relatively understudied aspect of data center environmental assessments, however, is the variability that may occur across the data center lifecycle. In this paper, we seek to address this gap by identifying those parameters which have the largest influence on different environmental impacts.