Data centers are a significant part of ICT and their considerable CO2 emissions are damaging both to the planet and company budgets - energy-related costs total over 40 percent of their expenses. But there is a glimmer of light on the horizon.

As part of a EU-funded project, experts from industry and academia designed and implemented an energy-aware plug-in that works on top of the current management tools used by data centers to organize the allocation of ICT resources and turn off unused equipment.

The solution slashes direct ICT energy consumption by more than 20 percent. The technology does not compromise the equipment's compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics.

The target of 20 percent was reached in each test bed and in some cases the savings were as much as 50 percent.

The comparison point for all the savings was the same system without any energy optimizations, said VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, whose main contribution to the project was working on optimizations in the supercomputing scenario.

The technology is now available to anyone who wants to use it with all 16 public deliverables of the project freely available on the FIT4Green project website. Likewise, the plug-in code has been released as open source software.

Carbon dioxide cuts on the same scale

ICT from telephone lines to computers and audio-visual systems, in short the devices that make our lives easier and more flexible in the 21st century, were responsible for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2008.

This means that CO2 emissions from ICT were just under 1 billion tonnes, a figure equivalent to the fuel consumption of the aviation sector.

But while governments, industry and regulators argue over the need and ways to bring emissions from aviation under control, much less is heard about the necessity of reducing CO2 from ICT in the fight against climate change.

Moreover, the team said that it achieved savings in CO2 emissions that were on the same scale as the energy savings.

A variety of European partners involved

FIT4Green ('Federated IT for a sustainable environmental impact') project under the 'ICT' Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

The importance of the FIT4Green project is clear from the variety of partners involved - ranging from leading multinationals to university departments. Indeed, the project was coordinated by the Spanish company GFI Informatica with Hewlett Packard Italy Innovation Centre (HP-IIC) as the technological leader.

Other partners included the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the universities of Passau and Mannheim, Germany, Imperial College London, United Kingdom, the Julich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Germany, CREATE-NET, an Italian research centre, Eni, the Italian multinational oil and gas company, and Almende, a Dutch research firm.