Green Information Technology Green Information Technology a Sustainable Approach
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Green Information Technology Green Information Technology A Sustainable Approach Edited by Mohammad Dastbaz Colin Pattinson Babak Akhgar AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON NEW YORK • OXFORD • PARIS • SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Morgan Kaufmann is an imprint of Elsevier Executive Editor: Steven Elliot Editorial Project Manager: Amy Invernizzi Project Manager: Punithavathy Govindaradjane Designer: Mark Rogers Morgan Kaufmann is an imprint of Elsevier 225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02451, USA Copyright # 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 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To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. ISBN: 978-0-12-801379-3 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress For information on all MK publications visit our website at www.mkp.com Foreword This book delivers a comprehensive perspective of the challenges brought by our increasing demand for digital services and raises the perennial question as to whether we can sustain the growth of these services to meet that rising demand, furthering the prospect that we may overload the Internet with unforeseen consequences on our lives. I would add three reflections to the book’s perspective, returning to the three pillars of sustainability. First there is the impact of economics; as supply outstrips demand, up go the prices. Would so-called frivolous use of the Internet then be priced to provide capacity for those who can pay and are willing to do so for digital services that are important in their lives? The social reflection is that growth in digital services is critical if we are all to live together successfully on this planet as our numbers grow to 9 billion and the resources we require to live increase exponentially beyond the immediate capacity of the planet. I believe that, without digital services and the Internet, we would not have the means to work together across communities, cities, nations, and the world to tackle the huge and complex problems that growth is bringing. Digital services will “extend” the resources available to us by enabling smarter, more closed-loop approaches that reduce our “take” from the finite new sources of minerals and metals still left in the earth. Perhaps we now have a new world war on our hands— a war between us and our appetites and behaviors. We will have to return to a mentality of “waste not, want not,” of being frugal so our neighbors can survive, and, above all, to recover and further develop our humanity from the digital silos into which it is sinking. Finally, the third reflection returns to environmental concerns. Digital services will and are delivering elsewhere significant reductions of the resources we take from the planet in living our lives. Through the “Internet of things,” we will be able to improve the monitoring and management of our planet’s resources and behaviors, and our own, to achieve greater efficiencies and the means to live within our “means.” xiii Foreword I therefore remain optimistic that the developments and opportunities set out herein will enable the growth in digital services to be sustained and thereby enable us to survive and prosper, albeit living in ways that would be alien to the founders of this great Digital Age. Bob Crooks, MBE Chair of the British Computer Society Green Specialist Group Defra Lead for Innovative and Sustainable ICT xiv Preface We are living in an era of amazing technological changes. With more than 2 billion PCs across the world and 48 billion Web pages indexed by some 900,000 servers, the era of “Big Data” and how we use it on a daily basis, and the environmental impact of storing and safeguarding this data have become a critical issues facing system developers and researchers across the globe. Green Information Technology: A Sustainable Approach offers, in a single volume, a broad collection of practical techniques and methodologies for designing, building, and implementing a green technology strategy in any large enterprise environment, which up until now have been scattered in difficult-to-find scholarly resources. Included here is the latest information on emerging technologies and their environmental impact, how to effectively measure sustainability, and discussions on sustainable hardware and software design, as well as how to use big data and cloud computing to drive efficiencies and establish a framework for sustainability in the information technology infrastructure. This book is arranged in five sections. Section 1 provides an introduction to emerging technologies and the challenges that lie ahead. Section 2 addresses some of the most important topics concerning how we measure “sustainability” as far as “Green Information Technology” is concerned and the available methodologies and their gaps. It also deals with the critical issue of the current legal framework (or lack of it) in regulating the development of Information Technology. Section 3 takes a look at “cloud computing and big data,” providing a thought provoking discussion around some of the challenges in these areas. Section 4 discusses some future solutions, discussing the “Internet of Things” and “Energy Harvesting,” as well as “Factory 2” concepts. The final section of this book, Section 5, is devoted to a number of state- of-the art case studies covering a range of research and their important findings. xv About the Editors Professor Mohammad Dastbaz is Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean of Faculty of Arts Environment and Technology at Leeds Beckett University. Professor Dastbaz main research work in recent years has been focused on the use and impact of emerging technologies in society, particularly learning, training, issues of privacy and cyber security and the development of “e-Government.” Mohammad has led EU- and UK-based funded research projects and has been the symposium chair of Multimedia Systems in IEEE’s Information Visualization (IV) conference since 2002. He has more than 50 refereed publications, including numerous journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and books on e-learning and e-government as well as design and development of multimedia systems. Professor Dastbaz is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and UK’s Higher Education Academy as well as a professional member of ACM and IEEE’s computer society. Professor Colin Pattinson is the Head of School Computing, Creative Technologies and Engineering at Leeds Beckett University. Professor Pattinson’s research and teaching have reflected the massive changes in computer and communications technologies beginning with very basic computer-to-computer connections through the development of the Internet to current developments in smart phones and cloud computing. Professor Pattinson continues to be an active researcher in these areas with a particular interest in measuring and understanding the performance of IT systems. This interest in performance measurement has led to current research interests in sustainability issues within IT on which he has supervised research projects in both the environmental impact of IT systems and the use of IT to enhance the sustainability of other aspects of human activity. He led a pan-European project to promote sustainability among data center professionals and is currently involved in two EU projects to develop and deliver sustainable IT curriculum for university-level courses. He is a committee member of the Green IT Specialist Group of BCS: The Chartered Institute for IT. Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics and Director of the Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence, and Organized Crime Research (CENTRIC) at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. He has more than 100 refereed publications in international journals and conferences on xvii About the Editors information systems with specific focus on knowledge