FIT4Green, a 30-month EU project started in January 2010, has reached the end of its final phase. In this third phase of the project, the optimization policies are refined and tested once again.

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

In the final third phase of the project, the optimization policies are refined and tested once again. FIT4Green also aims to increase the international awareness of energy-aware data centre technologies by organizing the 1st International Workshop on Energy-Efficient Data Centres (E2DC) in Madrid on May 8th, 2012, in conjunction with the e-Energy 2012 conference. It has been estimated that ICT as a whole, causes 2% of the overall CO2 emissions worldwide, a number equal to the emissions due to the aviation. Thus, reductions of 20% or more are a significant step towards a more sustainable world. The energy savings are also a great financial incentive for data centre owners to save money in their electricity bills.

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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