PEMC: Power efficiency measurement calculator to compute power efficiency and CO2emissions in cloud data centers

Abstract

The power consumption of cloud data centers has a considerable impact on the environment and climate change nowadays. Researchers are seeking to find practical solutions to reduce power consumption in data centers while guaranteeing the desired level of services and service level objectives. With the establishment of the data center industry, the demand for computation and data storage has been continually rising. Energy efficiency is one of the most significant issues faced by these big data centers to meet such high computational requirements. There are many industry acceptable metrics available such as PUE, DCiE, DCP, etc. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric has proven to be the most popular in measuring energy efficiency; however, it measures the power efficiency alone with no consideration for CO2emissions and the costs involved in total power usage across data centers. In this article, we proposed a novel Power Efficiency Measurement Calculator (PEMC) that combines and calculates the power efficiency, CO2emissions, and the total annual costs incurred. The pseudocode and algorithm to perform these specific PUE, DCiE, and CO2emission functions are given to explain the working of proposed work. Finally, the proposed PEMC calculator was tested and validated through a case study performed in one of the tier-level data centers in Malaysia and the results demonstrate its effectiveness compared with Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and other known calculators.