Energy-Efficient Cloud Servers: an overview of Solutions and Architectures

Because of the changing from traditional paper-based systems to a digital systems and the evolution of online storage and cloud computing, datacenters are becoming fundamental to almost every sector of the economy and the main energy consumers in the universe. With the acceptance of High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud computing, the area and number of cloud datacenter grow quickly; hence, it has become significant to optimize datacenter energy consumption. With modern energy efficient design in cloud datacenter infrastructure and cooling devices, active items like servers and cooling devices consume most of the power. In many researches, it was shown that cloud datacenters consume enormous energy; therefore researchers are looking for metrics of energy efficiency. The goal of energy efficient researches is to sufficiently take benefit of reachable resources such as processors and network devices, or to reduce thermal cooling expenses and energy consumption. In this paper, we discuss the state of the art researches and provide an overview of energy efficient solutions and architectures for cloud servers in processor design, power distribution unit, and server cooling management.