A Framework for Auditing Data Center Energy Usage and Mitigating Environmental Footprint

As the Data Science field continues to mature, and we collect more data, the demand to store and analyze them will continue to increase. This increase in data availability and demand for analytics will put a strain on data centers and compute clusters-with implications for both energy costs and emissions. As the world battles a climate crisis, it is prudent for organizations with data centers to have a framework for combating increasing energy costs and emissions to meet demand for analytics work. In this paper, I present a generalized framework for organizations to audit data centers energy efficiency to understand the resources required to operate a given data center and effective steps organizations can take to improve data center efficiency and lower the environmental impact.