The green sustainable telco cloud: Minimizing greenhouse gas emissions of server load migrations between distributed data centres

Abstract

Among the innovative approaches to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of data centres during their use phase, electrical power from renewable sources appears promising. However, renewable electricity is often intermittent due to meteorological conditions. Consequently, the regional availability of renewable power varies constantly over time. This created the opportunity to deploy cloud computing systems relying on data centres located in different regions. Cloud computing technology enables real-time load migration to a data centre in the region where the GHG emissions per kWh are the lowest. While this approach is becoming popular to manage distributed data centres, there is still room for improvement in its implementation. Indeed, the consequences of data centre power demand migrations across electric networks and the resulting GHG emissions are usually neglected. In this project, we developed a novel GHG emission factor based on the sources of electricity affected by the server load migrations. Then, we used this emission factor in a simulation of distributed data centres to minimize their GHG emissions. Results show, the use of the novel emission factor enables an extra reduction of 23% of GHG emissions as compared to the usual approach.