Statement of the Problem

The purpose of this report is to show the potential of lowering energy consumption when utilizing cloud computing to support data center operations. Cloud computing promises to change the way computer applications and services it created, delivered, and managed (Jamil, 2004). Although the term means different things to different people and includes a bit of creativity marketing advertising and technical redefinition, the potential benefits are open to definition (Armbrust, et al., 2009). Software services can obtain seemingly infinite scalability and incremental development to meet customers' elastic demands (Dhar, 2012). According to Aljabre (2012), the pay-as-you-go design and rapid provisioning can result in more efficient resource utilization and reduced costs. This collection of papers highlights some early efforts in what is likely to be a profitable area of innovation for years to come.

Cloud computing is an essential new paradigm in which computing is migrating from personal computers sitting on a person's desk and centrally managed datacenters (Foster, Zhao, Raicu, & Lu, 2009). How does cloud computing differ from Web services, Grid computing, and other previous models of distributed systems? What impacts of energy consumption and costs to adopting cloud computing technologies in the management of data centers? What's the underlying concept behind cloud computing and the relations between virtualization? What potential benefits of moving data centers to the cloud both in small and large organizations? Are there any associated risks of adopting the use of cloud data centers as well as some of the available remedies to such risks?

Purpose of the Study

This research proposal is primarily concerned with investigating the potential significance of adopting cloud computing to lower energy consumption in the contemporary data centers. However, particular issues include the economics of data center power management as well as a comparative analysis of the traditional data center operations and the emerging cloud computing technologies with regard to their impacts on energy consumption. More broadly will be based on these key motivations:

1. To study the impacts of high energy costs in the information and technology sector as well as the significance of adopting cloud computing technologies in the management of data centers.

2. To investigate the underlying concept behind cloud computing and the relations between various data virtualization techniques and other emerging technologies.

3. To determine the potential benefits of moving data centers to the cloud both in small and large organizations. The research will also seek to explore the potential use of cloud computing in the reduction of carbon emissions.

4. Lastly, the research will also involve investigate the associated risks of adopting the use of cloud data centers as well as some of the available remedies to such risks.

Research questions

Question researchers are asking to bring light on are issues associated with the adopting of cloud data centers, in comparison to traditional data centers. A large amount of energy are power up and cool servers host; in traditional data centers resulting in high energy costs (Buyya, Beloglazov, & Abawajy, 2010). Data center power management has become a critical element for IT organizations not only from an economic standpoint, but also for environmental preservation (Hang, Kuo, Ahmad, & Ming, 2010). The cloud computing data center operations with the desire to lower power consumption and reduce overhead (Berl et al., 2009). Cloud computing is "a new paradigm in which computing resources such as processing, memory, and storage are not physically present at the user's location. Instead, a service provider owns and manages these resources, and users access them via the Internet" (Kumar & Yung-Hsiang, 2010, p733). Ruth (2009) stated "every time a company shifts a workload of storage or processing to the cloud they are reducing their overall energy consumption" (p. 209).The following are the four research questions proposed for investigation:

Q1. What are the current implications of high energy costs in the information sector.

Q2. What is the potential significance of using cloud computing technologies to lower energy consumption?

Q3. What is the concept behind cloud computing and data virtualization?

Q4. What are the likely benefits of moving data centers to the cloud?

Q5. What are some of the associated risks and mitigation measures?