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FIT4Green ICT project saves up to 30% of energy

 

EU project FIT4Green, started in January 2010, targets to provide at least 20% saving in direct server and network devices energy consumption and inducess an additional 30% saving due to reduced cooling needs. Project’s first phase results are ready and they show direct energy savings starting from 6% up to 30%.

The project has created an energy-aware layer of plug-ins on top of the current data centres’ management tools to orchestrate the allocation of ICT resources and turning off unused equipments. FIT4Green approach is designed to be applicable to any data centre type; the plug-ins were validated in three representative data centres: service/enterprise portal at ENI, supercomputing grid at Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and cloud computing at HP.

The greatest energy savings, up to 30%, were achieved in service/enterprise portal. In cloud computing on average 18% savings were achieved. In service/enterprise portal and in cloud computing the energy savings were achieved by allocating the virtual machines in an energy-efficient manner and by turning off the unused servers. In service/enterprise portal, live migration of virtual machines was also used to optimise the number of servers. In supercomputing data centre the savings of 6% were based on setting the unused servers to low-power standby mode.

Overview

FIT4Green aims at contributing to ICT energy reducing efforts by creating an energy-aware layer of plug-ins for data centre automation frameworks, to improve energy efficiency of existing IT solution deployment strategies so as to minimize overall power consumption, by moving computation and services around a federation of  IT data centres sites.

The FIT4Green optimization layer will not compromise compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, and will operate on top of current data centre management tools to orchestrate the allocation of ICT resources and turn off the under-or unused equipment.

The project will consider the deployment of whole IT solutions, from client devices to the data centres where applications and services are dynamically allocated, including the impact of the networks that provide connectivity and re-deployment capability.

 The project rationale builds on the following shortcomings of current systems:

  • Virtualization, consolidation and data centre automation techniques provide a means to achieve flexibility of IT solutions; however reduced energy consumption (achieved as a side effect of the reduction in the number of servers) is generally not considered among the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the deployment options;
  • Current Service Level Agreements do not include any metrics related to environmental footprint.
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