Software-Driven Strategies to Reduce the Energy Footprint of Data Centers: A Systematic Literature Review

Internet traffic and data usage continue to increase over time. Consequently, the energy footprint of the ICT sector grows exponentially and significantly contributes to the global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs). Data Centers (DCs) have with 45% the largest energy footprint within the ICT sector. Hence, there is a need to reduce the energy footprint of DCs. In this study, we are interested in providing an overview of software-driven strategies to reduce the energy footprint of the ICT equipment of DCs. To this end, we conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in which we selected and analyzed 224 primary studies published in 2018-2021. The insights from this study are useful for researchers to understand which strategies are well-studied and which gaps remain. Furthermore, practitioners can utilize the overview as a guideline to adapt the strategies in practice. We identified five main strategies, namely: VM consolidation, Resource management, Monitoring, Network optimization, and Container consolidation. Furthermore, we identified characteristics, such as metrics, algorithms, and evaluation types, from these strategies and used this to compare the various strategies