GAMES (Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service centers) is an FP7 European research project, aiming at developing a set of methodologies, software tools and services, and innovative metrics for the Energy Efficiency Design and Management of the Data Centers of the next generation (namely IT Service Centers). Energy efficiency of Data Centers and Green IT more in general are emerging as some of the most critical environmental challenges to be faced, because of the increasing yet unprecedented trend in digitization of business processes. Thanks to the adoption of the GAMES tools and technology, Data Centers are expected to increase their energy efficiency and reducing their global carbon footprint by up to 25%, while not deteriorating their overall performance levels. This will be done by directly combining and integrating the energy consumption measured at the three different levels of business/applications, IT components workload (processors, storage) and building in a unique real-time and more granular monitoring framework. The project will extend OSS data center monitoring tools with the capacity of assessing, monitoring and controlling, both in a reactive and proactive way.
GAMES will also enrich data center management web-tools with advanced Knowledge-based and Information extraction features by originally combining Data mining, Semantic and Context Management technologies for closely aligning users business requirements for power demand with historical trend and real available resources. Finally, GAMES will provide tools with an Adaptive Control feature, matching the planned behaviour with the output dynamically provided by the energy sensing and monitoring infrastructure, the user context and historical patterns, for evaluating if and to a what extent the adopted course of actions will contribute to effectively manage the energy costs. Energy saving is an issue that is gaining more and more importance in the recent period. Because of the high costs due to the power consumption, companies urgently need solution able to cut these costs as much as possible. Inside the GREEN IT world, project GAMES wants to extend the number of possible solutions that could be adopted by companies, and in particular by data centers. For this reason tools and methodologies that will be developed in the GAMES project will take into account real data centers. Thus, real applications and real data will be used to validate the proposed approach. In addition, new data centers could be also take advantage of the methodologies proposed in GAMES to build solutions having energy saving as a first class concept.