Dynamic management of ICT service infrastructures for energy efficiency optimization

Improving the energy efficiency of ICT service provisioning infrastructures presents many advantages, both from the corporate social responsibility and from the business competitiveness perspective. In this context, reducing data center energy consumption is one of the main tasks to focus on, since these facilities concentrate a great share of an ICT service provider's power demand in a small number of locations. The adoption of commercial energy-saving solutions, based on static configurations, introduces significant improvements, but considerable infrastructure underutilization levels remain. In order to allow ICT service providers to overcome the limitations found in existing energy efficiency tools, this paper describes an infrastructure management solution which dynamically adjusts the performance of the managed environment to match service demand, thus optimizing energy consumption. Additionally, the first validation experiences of the proposed management solution in the context of a telecom operator's service provisioning infrastructure are described.