Green Data Centers: A Survey, Perspectives, and Future Directions

TL;DR

This survey reviews current research on green data centers, focusing on energy efficiency, resource management, and thermal control, highlighting challenges and future directions for sustainable data center development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview and comparison of recent green data center techniques, identifying key challenges and future research issues.

Findings

Many techniques improve energy efficiency and resource utilization.

Thermal management remains a significant challenge.

Future research should focus on integrated green metrics and innovative cooling solutions.

Abstract

At present, a major concern regarding data centers is their extremely high energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. However, because of the over-provisioning of resources, the utilization of existing data centers is, in fact, remarkably low, leading to considerable energy waste. Therefore, over the past few years, many research efforts have been devoted to increasing efficiency for the construction of green data centers. The goal of these efforts is to efficiently utilize available resources and to reduce energy consumption and thermal cooling costs. In this paper, we provide a survey of the state-of-the-art research on green data center techniques, including energy efficiency, resource management, thermal control and green metrics. Additionally, we present a detailed comparison of the reviewed proposals. We further discuss the key challenges for future research and highlight some future research issues for addressing the problem of building green data centers.