Data Centers Sustainability: Approaches to Green Data Centers

The numbers of datacenters around the globe are increasing due to rise in demand of ICT applications such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, and increasing number of consumers of these applications. Datacenters are a kind of backbone for provisioning and availability of these services and huge amount of data that is being produced. This increase needs to be assessed in terms of the environmental impact it has, which the existing literature and reports tell us is quite negative given the carbon footprint. GHG emissions destroy our environment and contribute to global warming. In this paper we assess the environmental impact of datacenters, identify factors that cause datacenters to emit Co2, study relevant existing literature on efforts that have been made in identification and elimination of these factors, performance metrics to measure sustainability of datacenters and in the end, we discuss common strategies that can contribute in making datacenters more sustainable. At the end we study few datacenters which have been claimed to be green and sustainable, to identify how these datacenters achieve their sustainability goals for example reduced carbon emissions, types of energy resources used, and how they curbed e-waste production and suggest a framework based on the findings.