Multi-Criteria Assessment of Data Centers Environmental Sustainability

The size and capacity of Data Centers (DCs) is growing at a rapid pace to meet the increased demand of data processing and storage capacity requested by a digital information society. Since DCs are infrastructures that have large energy consumption, there is a need to change their design approach to make them more efficient and more environment friendly. This research was motivated by the planning of a new DC in Portugal. It proposes a multi-criteria framework to assess the sustainability of a DC, which includes a new metric to evaluate the DC efficiency taking into account the environmental conditions of the DC location. ELECTRE TRI was chosen for aggregating different metrics concerning the environmental sustainability of a DC into sustainability categories. The evaluation methodology allows some freedom for each DC to place more weight on the aspects in which it is stronger, an analysis facilitated by the IRIS decision support system.