Sustainability-aware Resource Provisioning in Data Centers

In the big data era, cloud computing provides an effective usage model for providing computing services to handle diverse data-intensive workloads. Data center capacity planning and resource provisioning policies play a vital role in longterm life cycle management of datacenters. Effective design and management of data center infrastructures while ensuring good performance is critical to minimizing the carbon footprint of the datacenter. Traditional solutions have primarily focused on optimizing data center operational phase impacts including reducing energy cost during the resource management phase. In this paper, we propose a two-phase sustainability-aware resource allocation and management framework for data center life-cycle management that jointly optimizes the data center manufacturing phase and operational phase impact without impacting the performance and service quality for the jobs. Phase 1 of the proposed approach minimizes data center building phase carbon footprint through a novel manufacturing cost-aware server provisioning plan. In phase 2, the approach minimizes the operational phase carbon footprint using a server lifetime-aware resource allocation scheme and a manufacturing cost-aware replacement plan. The proposed techniques are evaluated through extensive experiments using realistic workloads generated in a data center. The evaluation results show that the proposed framework significantly reduces the carbon footprint in the data center without impacting the performance of the jobs in the workload.