Energy Sustainable Provisioning for Green Data Centers

Abstract

In recent years, the integration of renewable energy source with data centers has emerged as a promising aptitude focusing on economic and environmental perspectives. This paper studies an efficient energy sustainable framework aiming to maximize the utilization of green energy and curbing down the operating cost associated in provisioning computing services across a group of data centers. Under the proposed framework, the green data centers (GDC) are envisioned to be jointly powered by solar photovoltaic (SPV) modules with commercial grid supply. Additionally, a sufficient energy storage system (ESS) is installed for enhancing system reliability under 10 years project duration. The validation of our approach is comprehensively investigated in terms of optimal architecture, energy yield analysis, cost assessment etc. varying different system parameters using the HOMER optimization software. Based on this architectural framework, some research challenges are discussed. Simulation results demonstrate that a green data center has an immense potential as it offers significant energy efficient operations via reducing on-grid consumption while maintaining the quality of service.