Guidelines For Eco-Friendly Data Centres Lessons Learnt In Three European Research Projects On Data Centres Energy Savings

Data centres are becoming the key infrastructure elements in Smart Cities programs, as well as the foundation for any loT and Big Data platform. The data centres are therefore - on one side - supporting in general the growth of ICT services, but - on the other side - are becoming more and more large energy consumers and contributors to GM emissions. Also, some data centres tend to move back into (or nearby) the cities for reasons like avoiding network latency issues of critical real-time interactive applications, whereas Smart Cities have tight objectives of environment sustainability and renewable energy utilization. Therefore, data centres must maximize their ability to run at minimal environmental impact and to exploit the presence of clean (renewable) energy sources.During the last years, the European Commission co-funded several research projects on data centre energy efficiency: this talk will initially present a brief summary of three of them, i.e. FlT4Green, All4Green and DC4Cities. Finally, based on the lesson learnt in these and other parallel projects, a set of guidelines will be presented to supporting data centres becoming inure eco-friendly: first introducing energy -awareness in the data centre management, then helping to identify and plan enhancements in logistics, hardware, software and operations, finally examining useful metrics to evaluate the improvements and environment impact.