by Monica Vitali and Barbara Pernici, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Abstract:
Concerns about energy and sustainability are growing everyday involving a wide range of fields. Even Information Systems are being influenced by the issue of reducing pollution and energy consumption and new fields are rising dealing with this topic. One of these fields is Green IT, which deals with energy efficiency with a focus on IT. Researchers have faced this problem according to several points of view. The purpose of this paper is to understand the trends and the future development of Green IT by analyzing the state of the art and classifying existing approaches to understand which are the components that have an impact on energy efficiency in Information Systems and how this impact can be reduced. At first, we explore some guidelines that can help to understand the efficiency level of an organization and of an Information System. Then we discuss measurement and estimation of energy effiiency and identify which are the components that mainly contribute to energy waste and how it is possible to improve energy efficiency, both at the hardware and at the software level.
Keywords: Energy Efficiency; Green IS; Green IT; Information Systems; Assessment;
International Journal on Cooperative Information Systems, published on line in March 2014, http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218843014500014
