Energy Conservations in Big Data

Infrastructure: A Concise Study of Data Center

Houman Zarrabi

Institute of Communication Technologies

Iran Telecommunication Research Center
Tehran, Iran
Abstract The availability of dependable physical infrastructure is essential to the existence of big data. In fact,
without the accessibility of a robust physical infrastructure, big data probably couldnt emerge as much. In order to
support such a huge volume of data, a physical infrastructure for big data must be big enough to handle the
associated requests. This means satisfying both the quantity and the quality aspects of data handling. By quantity we
refer to the substantial figure of the computational nodes, and by quality we refer to their high performance.
Redundancy is a key factor to improve service availability in big data. On the other hand, low latency is a crucial
necessity of big data. These requirements together, greatly contribute to the energy consumptions of infrastructure
that support big data. In this paper, we briefly review some energy attributes, as well as some conservation techniques
that are effective and can alleviate the energy utilization of big data infrastructure. We mainly focus on the study of
data center as it is the pivot component in the big data ecosystem.
Keywords: Big Data, Energy Management, Data Center.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Managing and analyzing data often offers many

advantages across all industry sectors. The businesses
struggle to extract valuable information with respect to
their available customers, products and services, and
want to provision the future of their business. Initially
when a corporate has small number of customers, and
usually with similar purchasing behavior, the business
analysis becomes simple; yet, in contemporary
societies with immense number of large corporations
competing against each other, having access to the
valuable information of the customers, products, and
services can be very valuable, both economically and
socially.
Indeed, in modern societies with large number of
businesses, each with a sophisticated business model
and a large number of customers, an enormous data
volume is generated every year. According to Intel
corporation, 4 zettabyte of data was created only in

45

2013 (1 zettabyte equals 1 billion terabytes) [1]. Such

amount of data is generated by various sources
including emails, documents, customer records,
pictures, videos, social media, mobile communication,
etc., just to name a few. Such various data types
together with the emergence of Internet of Things
(IoT) ubiquitous sensory data, create a significant
volume with a large set of forms and formats. Such a
large set of data types are unstructured. In this case, it
will be practically impossible to think about
performing data management and analysis in the
traditional ways. Big data is considered as the
capability to manage and analyze such a huge volume
of diverse data, with an acceptable processing speed
and an acceptable tolerable time frame, to allow realtime analysis and perform high quality services [2].
Accordingly, big data is referred to with three known
characteristics: Volume which refers to the amount of
data, Velocity which refers to the processing and
fetching time of data, and Variety which refers to the
types of data.