Integrated Design and Management of a Sustainable Data Center

The environmental impact of data centers is significant and is growing rapidly. However, there are many opportunities for greater efficiency through integrated design and management of data center components. To that end, we propose a sustainable data center that replaces conventional services in the physical infrastructures with more environmentally friendly IT services. We have identified five principles for achieving this vision: data center scale lifecycle design, flexible and configurable building blocks, pervasive sensing, knowledge discovery and visualization, and autonomous control. We describe these principles and present specific use cases for their application. Successful implementation of the sustainable data center vision will require multi-disciplinary collaboration across various research and industry communities.