Green Data Center Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

The concerns about environmental impacts, electricity cost, and energy needs of data centers are mounting. These concerns have given significant impetus to consider energy efficiency as one of the major data center design parameters for researchers and IT executives. Tremendous growth in the size and computing demands of data centers mandate scalable, fault tolerant, and energy efficient network infrastructure within data centers. In the recent years, new Data Center Network (DCN) architectures have aptly proposed a viable solution to the issues posed by the legacy DCNs. New DCN architectures are required to be energy efficient and energy proportional, besides dealing with other identified design drawbacks, such as scalability, fault tolerance, end-to-end bandwidth, and non-agility. In this article, we will deliberate on the various DCN architectures, their inherent problems, and the potentials to achieve energy efficiency. We will also shed light on myriad techniques that may be suitable to make the DCN architectures more energy efficient and energy proportional. Finally, we will outline future directions.