On the feasibility of collaborative green data center ecosystems

The increasing awareness of the impact of the IT sector on the environment, together with economic factors, have fueled many research efforts to reduce the energy expenditure of data centers. Recent work proposes to achieve additional energy savings by exploiting, in concert with customers, service workloads and to reduce data centers’ carbon footprints by adopting demand-response mechanisms between data centers and their energy providers. In this paper, we debate about the incentives that customers and data centers can have to adopt such measures and propose a new service type and pricing scheme that is economically attractive and technically realizable. Simulation results based on real measurements confirm that our scheme can achieve additional energy savings while preserving service performance and the interests of data centers and customers.