Energy wasting at internet data centers due to fear

• Data centers represent the hungriest consumers of energy within IT companies.
• Energy saving involves two direct benefits: sustainability and cost reduction.
• This paper provides measurement of risk aversion experienced by administrators.

The fear experienced by datacenter administrators presents an ongoing problem due to the low percentage of machines that they are willing to switch off in order to save energy. This risk aversion can be assessed from a cognitive system. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the extra costs incurred by maintaining all the machines of a data center executing continuously for fear of damaging hardware, degradating the service, or losing data. To this end, an objective function which minimizes energy consumption depending on the number of times that the machines are switched on/off is provided. The risk aversion experienced by these data center administrators can be measured from the percentage of machines that they are willing to switch off. It is shown that it is always the best option to turn off machines in order to reduce costs, given a formulation of the cognitive aspects of the fear experienced by datacenter administrators.