Sustainable Ecosystems: Enabled by Supply and Demand Management

Continued population growth, coupled with increased per capita consumption of resources, poses a challenge to the quality of life of current and future generations. We cannot expect to meet the future needs of society simply by extending existing infrastructures. The necessary transformation can be enabled by a sustainable IT ecosystem made up of billions of service-oriented client devices and thousands of data centers. The IT ecosystem, with data centers at its core and pervasive measurement at the edges, will need to be seamlessly integrated into future communities to enable need-based provisioning of critical resources. Such a transformation requires a systemic approach based on supply and demand of resources. A supply side perspective necessitates using local resources of available energy, alongside design and management that minimizes the energy required to extract, manufacture, mitigate waste, transport, operate and reclaim components. The demand side perspective requires provisioning resources based on the needs of the user by using flexible building blocks, pervasive sensing, communications, knowledge discovery and policy-based control. This paper presents a systemic framework for supply-demand management in IT—in particular, on building sustainable data centers—and suggests how the approach can be extended to manage resources at the scale of urban