scope:

INTRODUCTION

Over the last several years, energy consumption by data centers in the US as well as worldwide has become a topic of intense discussion within the Information and communication Technologies (ICT) world. There are numerous publications presenting statistics on the impact of data center power consumption on the supply of electricity. One of the more comprehensive studies was that requested by the US Congress in Public Law 109-431, in which the EPA was mandated to quantify the electricity usage by US DATA centers, resulting in Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431, 2007. The key finding of this study is that in 2006, US data centers consumed 1.5% of all electricity used in the US and that according to historical trends, this consumption would rise to 2.9% by 2011. The 1.5% electricity usage included servers and the infrastructure to support servers, but did not include network or storage equipment.