Cloud computing for environment-friendly data centers

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the carbon footprint and utilization rates in a data center. The long-term goal of this work is to give data center administrators an enhanced perspective of data center operations to allow for more energy efficient operation, to lower the carbon footprint, and to promote green data centers. Previous literature shows that low utilization rates in data centers are due to the forecasting of demand to meet spikes in data center use. This management policy has led to many servers running idle the majority of the time which is a waste of resources. We argue that a majority of the data centers should be down sized through decommissioning of phantom servers, virtualization, and shifting spikes in demand to a cloud provider. We use data from the operations of a mid-to-large scale data center in a university. We deploy data mining techniques of decision trees and case-based reasoning to conduct analysis for decision support in cloud computing at data centers. We provide recommendations based on a literature search and our own work. This paper describes our work in progress in the area of developing green data centers.