Green Technology, Cloud Computing and Data Centers: the Need for Integrated Energy Efficiency Framework and Effective Metric

Energy efficiency (EE), energy consumption cost and environmental impact are vibrant challenges to cloud computing and data centers. Reducing energy consumption and emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in data centers represent open areas and driving force for future research work on green data centers. Our Literature review reveals that there are currently several energy efficiency frameworks for data centers which combine a green IT architecture with specific activities and procedures that led to decrease the impact on environment and less CO2 emissions. The current available frameworks have some pros and cons that is the reason why there is an urgent need for an integrated criterion for selecting and adopting energy efficiency framework for data centers. The required energy efficiency framework criteria should also consider the social network applications as a vital related factor in elevating energy consumption, as well as high potential for better energy efficiency in data centers. Additionally, in this paper, we highlighted the importance of the identification of efficient and effective energy efficiency metric that can be used for the measurement and determination of the value of data centers efficiency and their performance combined with sound and empirically validated integrated EE framework.