The Cutting Edge

The pan-European FIT4Green project, which is focused on finding new energy saving solutions for data centers, is claiming to have discovered solutions that reduce data center energy consumption by more than 20 percent.

The project designed and implemented an energy-aware plug-in on top of the current data centers’ management tools to orchestrate the allocation of ICT resources and turning off unused equipment. Project achieved its goal: 20 percent direct ICT equipment energy savings without compromising compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. The achieved savings in CO2 emissions were on the same scale as in energy. The direct energy savings in the ICT equipment induce also remarkable additional savings due to the reduced needs for cooling, for example. FIT4Green plug-in is designed to be applicable to any data center type.

The plug-in was validated in three representative data centers: service/enterprise portal at ENI, supercomputing data center at Jülich Supercomputing Centre with a federated site at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and cloud computing platform at HP. VTT’s work in the project concentrated on the optimizations in the supercomputing scenario. The target of 20 percent was reached in each test bed, and in some cases the savings were even up to 50 percent. The comparison point for all the savings was the same system without any energy optimizations.

All the 16 public deliverables of the project are freely available on the project web site at http://www.fit4green.eu/. The plug-in code has also been released as open source software.

FIT4Green was coordinated by GFI Informática with HP Italy Innovation Centre as the technological leader. Other partners besides VTT were University of Passau, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Imperial College London, University of Mannheim, Create-Net, Eni S.p.A., andAlmende BV.

Paul Buckley writes for EETimes, from where this article is adapted.