Proposal on eco-friendly operation scheme for reducing energy consumption of data center

Recently, the rapid growth of Internet traffic has increased the volume of IT equipment in use. Reducing its power consumption is important to support such growing traffic. Furthermore, the energy consumption of servers and network equipment such as routers and switches accounts for about half the total energy consumption of all IT equipment. This is an incentive to reduce energy consumption at data centers, where numerous servers and network equipment are in operation. In this paper, we propose a new eco-friendly operation scheme for reducing the energy consumption of a data center that is effective in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments. In our proposal, we introduce a management server to monitor the server resource utilization periodically. In addition, the management server may dynamically change the data center configuration based on such utilization. For example, when the utilization is low, the management server changes the configuration so that the services can be provided via fewer servers and less network equipment, and turns off unnecessary servers and network equipment. We implement a system based on the proposed scheme, and evaluate its performance. The result shows that the proposed scheme is able to reduce the energy consumption of servers and network equipment by about 32.1% at maximum.