In the 21st century, a crucial part of the information infrastructure is the data centre. It is already part of data communication, accommodation, and processing in practically every industry. However, with rising demands of power and escalating electricity prices, the engineers must improve the efficiency of data centres. Although not all energy waste can be evaded, engineers have been working to find ways to improve data centres’ performance in energy use in recent decades. The energy consumption and techniques to maximize energy efficiency in the data centre will be introduced into three parts: energy consumed by computing devices, power utilized by the cooling system and the use of renewable energy.
In data centre operation, roughly 50% of the energy goes into powering servers for computation and other functions(Uddin, Shah and Memom, 2014). Therefore, the large portion of electricity usage has led engineers to focus on saving energy in computing equipment (Pickering, 2008). The most implemental solution is server virtualization. The idea of this technology is to use fewer servers to accomplish tasks by breaking the connection between serves and the responsibility assigned by customers. In the case when applications do not need the full power of multiple servers, virtualization separates the single physical host into one or more virtual machines; therefore, the resources are isolated and shared within a short-range (Uddin et al.,2014). Consequently, multiple jobs can run efficiently on fewer physical servers, reducing the number of computers required. Scheduling tasks along the many cores available in multi-core processors is also a realistic solution to increase efficiency performance. The multiple-core processor allows different subtasks to be computed simultaneously in a single program (Loper& Parr,2007); thus, energy consumption and computation time are being reduced. Ultimately, using battery management of the application also significantly lessen the usage of electricity because it requires fewer servers to process information.
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The other majority cost of power, cooling infrastructure can be diminished in several ways. According to Uddin, Shah and Memon(2014), 50% of the consumed energy is never transferred to the computing resource; instead, it is utilized by the cooling system in most data centres. Primarily, the cost can be reduced by preventing hot and cold air mixing. One of the top choices among data centres is the hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement. Thereby，the computing device racks should be arranged that fronts of the servers face one another to take advantage of the aisle order. Additionally, in order to achieve a minimum level of consumption, more efficient cooling systems such as economizers may be installed to replace the older systems. Furthermore, in terms of optimization, the right sizes of the cooling system might help to reduce the total amount of electricity, the unit consumes(Loper& Parr,2007).
Other than energy-saving measures in facilities and equipment, solve the energy consumption from the source of energy aspect is also a fashionable way. The use of renewable energy has dramatically reduced costs up to this point. For example, hydroelectric energy is cheap, easy to install, and, most importantly, it will generate much energy (Instor, n.d.). In terms of that, many companies are building data centres next to dams in order to use clean energy more efficiently. Besides, if the data centre is equipped with renewable energy sources (such as biomass) that can be used on-demand, the energy supply can be adjusted according to the expected workload of the data centre(Uddin et al.,2014). As a result, some data centres that use renewable energy can, if possible, schedule their workload according to the availability of those sources; hence, to save a lot of power and money.
In conclusion, the demand for internet resource will only surge in the coming years, As an integral part of information infrastructure, the efficiency of the data centre would become extremely important in a way reducing the cost of electricity. Improving efficiency that is consumed by computing resource and cooling systems would dramatically enhance the efficiency of data centre operation. In addition, The use of renewable energy solves the difficulty of scheduling the workload and healthily contributes to the environment. The energy efficiency techniques originally applied to data centres could be used on other devices in the future and overcome the issues and challenges of further information society.
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