Title: Carbon sustainability framework to reduce CO₂ emissions in data centres

Authors: Mueen Uddin; Azizah Abdul Rahman; Jamshed Memon

Addresses: Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). ' Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). ' Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)

Abstract: Reducing the impact of greenhouse gases (CO₂) on climate change in an attempt to tackle global warming issues is a challenge many companies and businesses are trying to undertake. Businesses across the globe need to take a leadership role in reducing their carbon footprint. This paper proposes a new IT-based carbon sustainability framework that provides a comprehensive strategy to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (CO₂) from data centres in order to reduce the effects of global warming. The proposed IT sustainability framework reduces the overall cost of ownership in data centres by employing new technologies to increase the use of already installed servers and proposes metrics to measure the efficiency of data centres from time to time in terms of energy consumptions and CO₂ emissions. The proposed framework also increases the awareness of implementing metrics and highlights the development of a sustainability strategy for data centre managers to implement energy saving and CO₂ emission techniques to enable them to increase productivity and help businesses gain a competitive edge.

Keywords: carbon emissions; carbon sustainability framework; data centres; greenhouse gases; environmental sustainability; metrics; sustainable development; CO2; carbon dioxide; climate change; global warming; information technology; energy saving; energy consumption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGE.2011.044619

International Journal of Green Economics, 2011 Vol.5 No.4, pp.353 - 369

Published online: 16 Oct 2014 *

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