EnergIT: A Methodology for the Incremental Green Design of Data Centers

Researches on green data centers have defined guidelines and end-to-end methodologies to increase energy efficiency. Most of these approaches require a disrupting reengineering of the infrastructure and significant upfront investments. Smaller data centers need to reach green objectives with a more incremental approach. The EnergIT project proposes a methodology and related tools that support the incremental redesign of data centers toward greater energy efficiency based on three main levers: 1) physical repositioning of servers to optimize air flow circulation and cooling, enabling higher set temperatures of the cooling system; 2) replacement of server models; and 3) virtualization. This paper describes the approach and provides evidence on the effectiveness of the methodology by showing how the combined effect of the three levers has led to 62% reduction of energy consumption in a real case study. EnergIT: A Methodology for the Incremental Green Design of Data Centers