Effective management of green Cloud data centers using energy storage technologies

Energy storage technologies make the green energy more available by attenuating the problem of its intermittent generation, and then reduce carbon emissions by decreasing the use of brown energies (like those from oil and natural gas). The use of batteries in data centers and Cloud infrastructures is one of the most promising applications of energy storage. In this paper, we analyze the problem of optimizing the use of green energy in geographically distributed Cloud data centers using batteries for energy storage. We propose a MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) model that is able to capture the main design and management issues and to provide the optimal configuration considering service scenarios and storage capacities. The model also consider the network interconnecting the data centers and its energy consumption so as to redirect requests to different data center locations when this is convenient from the energy point of view.