Context-aware characterisation of energy consumption in data centres

Carbon emissions are receiving increased attention and scrutiny in all walks of life and the ICT sector is no exception. With the increase in on-demand applications and services together with on-demand compute/storage facilities in server farms or data centres there are self-evident increases in the power requirements to maintain such systems. Proponents of the impact of increased carbon emissions when powering electrical systems in general however, regularly impress negative side-effects such as influence on climate change. Action is subsequently being encouraged to halt further environmental damage. The problem is explored in this paper from the point of view of carbon emissions from data centre operations and the development of energy-aware management and energy-efficient networking solutions. Data centre energy consumption costs drive the evaluation process within a Data Centre Energy-Efficient Context-Aware Broker (DCe-CAB) algorithm designed as an original solution to this significant carbon-contributing network scenario. In this paper, performance requirements and objectives of the DCe-CAB are defined, along with case study demonstration of the way in which it optimises selection and operation of data centres using context-awareness.