Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A Digital Infrastructure for Green Utility Computing:
The Preliminary Holistic Research Agenda
Elena Irina Neaga *
School of Business and Economics,
Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, United Kingdom
e.i.neaga@lboro.ac.uk
Abstract. The paper presents ICT environmental issues and discusses the
transition towards green utility computing. Cloud services mainly based on
virtualisation have a huge undiscovered yet potential to adequately address the
issues of ICT to become greener alongside other economics (labour related
costs such as people managing the ICT infrastructure). In order to outline the
research agenda the paper includes a systemic / holistic analysis of the ICT
development and usage as a pervasive/ubiquitous enabler in the daily life
activities as well as different economic sectors (e.g. transportation,
manufacturing, commerce, tourism etc.) and the increased environmental
impacts. The main aim of this approach is the definition of a multi perspective
research agenda for the development of an environmentally aware digital
infrastructure to deploy green utility computing in the cloud. The increasing
complexity of managing the whole infrastructure of platforms, people and
services that transparently support ICT as a utility is also discussed. Some
boundaries conditions are imposed.
Keywords: utility and cloud computing, virtualization, green/environmentally
friendly ICT, energy efficiency, complex system and complexity, system
dynamics.
1
Introductory Background
Environmental issues are emerging as important topics in the agenda of almost any
technology advancement and associated debates. Several ICT vendors are becoming
increasingly aware of the importance of producing environmentally friendly products.
This is not surprising as the Global Action Plan (2009) supported by Logicalis, and the
Environmental ICT showed that 2% of global carbon emissions are due to ICT [1]. An
interesting aspect is that 98% of global carbon emissions require solutions [1] where
ICT is expected to play an important role to support comprehensive environmentally
aware approaches as described by Ghose et al. (2008) [2]. Indeed, ICT could support
the energy efficiency and environmental awareness through intelligent systems
enabling to reduce resource consumption, and power management. Xiao (2011)
provided an approach for modeling and managing efficient power management of
mobile technologies [3]. Other approaches suggested how new computing technologies
* Corresponding author.
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search