Energy Efficiency of Data Centers

As the power consumption has a significant and continuously increasing part of the operational expenses of data centers, energy efficient data center networking has received special attention from the academic and industrial research community recently. The complex design of data centers provides several directions toward more energy efficiency, including the consumption of servers and network equipments. We address the issue of power consumption of data centers from a higher-level point of view by analyzing the energy efficiency of data center architectures. We review the state-of-the-art data center architectures including BCube, DCell, fat-tree, and Scafida and present evaluate their energy-efficiency quantitatively. In addition, the trade-off between the power consumption and the performance of the data center is investigated. Next, other aspects of data centers’ energy efficiency is revealed including thermal control techniques, energy management systems. Finally, a standard data center energy efficiency metric called PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is presented.

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