GreenSLAs for the energy-efficient management of data centres
Sonja Klingert, Thomas G. Schulze, Christian Bunse · 2011
As part of the growing pervasiveness of information technology (IT) in the global economy, the last decade has seen a trend of outsourcing IT services, first into traditional data centres, and nowadays more and more into "fuzzy structures" (aka the cloud). This trend has led to the expansion of the IT service business, to the emergence of the data centre industry - and at the same time to a dramatic increase of the energy consumption of data centres. Since the services provided by data centres are typically ruled by performance-oriented SLAs energy awareness is only of lower ranking importance for the service provision in a data centre. GreenSLAs can help counteracting this problem by offering data centres new degrees of freedom to re-organize their service provision in an energy-efficient way. This paper suggests outlines and first ideas for the design of GreenSLAs, based on the key vision that these need to present a win-win situation for both data centre service-provider and customer. The technical and QoS related implications of energy efficiency strategies are analyzed, and it is shown how the findings can be utilized for the design of GreenSLAs.