Sustainability for Estimating Global Energy Efficiency of Data Centers

The modern digital landscape has turned data centers into one of the most important technologies to date. They are now tasked with handling very intensive workloads and also are responsible for processing a large amount of data. This, in turn, has led to an important aspect to consider as technology evolves at the pace it is now, that is energy efficiency. Data centers now support more than just business critical workloads and applications; they are now the bridge between different technologies like IoT devices, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Such technologies function at the highest level and require more and more data processing and storage, leading to more power being consumed. In this paper we investigate how global estimates of energy consumption of the data centers could continue to be improved as the center’s components continue to evolve. A model to predict just how much energy will be consumed in order to process and store all of the data needed to perform various tasks is discussed. Components like networking equipment such as switches play an important role in the efficiency of the data center, another component that is vital to all operations in a data center is the hardware architecture, for example the chip used in the switches. These combined paint a picture of how much energy and power will be needed to power data centers and the equipment inside of them.