Introducing Greenhouse Emissions in Cost Optimization of Fault-Tolerant Data Center Design

Global climate change is one of the challenges of our time. Due to ever increasing demand, data center providers have to consider the ecological effects of their business. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are very likely to contribute significantly to climate change and, therefore, should be reduced. In data centers, GHG emissions are not only caused by the consumed energy for data center operation, but also originate from other life cycle phases of IT components, such as manufacturing. However, when minimizing GHG emissions of data centers, the effects on cost and quality of offered IT services should also be considered. Therefore, an optimization problem is introduced in this paper on the basis of redundancy allocation problems which minimizes IT service costs and GHG emissions subject to an availability service level objective. Conducted experiments using data from a real-world use case demonstrate that emissions can be reduced significantly with only slightly increased cost if these are considered in an optimization approach.