The Greening of Data Centers with Cloud Technology

Abstract

This article presents a decision support system to provide green or energy efficient solutions for data centers that maintain computers and peripherals to serve organizations. Traditionally, data centers catered to all operations using in-house servers. Cloud technology provides alternatives to outsource operations heading towards greenness. However, using cloud services for all data center operations may have its pitfalls. In this paper, the authors analyze various data center parameters such as carbon footprint and power usage effectiveness along with cloud-based and server-based models. They consider data mining techniques of decision trees and case based reasoning in their work. Among other findings, they head towards a hybrid model that meets the demands of productivity, energy efficiency and related factors. These findings lead to the development of the decision support system. The authors describe the research, development and evaluation of the system. They conclude with important outcomes deployed in real-world scenarios in data center management.