FIT4Green, a 30-month EU project started in January 2010, has reached the end of its second phase. The second phase considered mainly energy and CO2 emission optimizations in federated data centres. The results show direct ICT equipment energy savings starting from 17% up to 50% in federated data centres. The savings were achieved without compromising compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics.

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 this second phase of the project, the refined single data centre site optimizations of the first phase, as well as the new optimization policies for the federated data centres were tested. In service/enterprise portal, about 30% energy savings were achieved within a single site, and 28% up to 50% savings in the federated site. In cloud computing data centre, the savings were 10% to 24% for the single site and 17% to 22% in the federated site. These energy savings were achieved by allocating the new virtual machines in an energy-efficient manner and by turning off the unused servers. The number of servers was also optimised by using live migration of virtual machines from server to another server. In supercomputing data centre the savings were 4% to 27% in single site depending on the utilization of the data centre, and 30% to 42%, even 52% in the federated site. These savings were based on setting the unused servers to low-power standby mode and by allocating the new jobs to the different data centres in an energy-efficient manner.