SLAs for energy-efficient data centres: The standards-based approach of the OPTIMIS project

In current Cloud environments customers aiming to select a provider that offers energy efficient infrastructure usually depend on believing in the providers publicity. In general they have little chances to alter the standard contract the big providers are offering. Smaller providers might offer the possibility to include energy efficiency as a clause in their paper framework contract. However, so far there is no way to dynamically create a Service Level Agreement with a provider that includes a certain level of energy efficiency the provider guarantees. The European project OPTIMIS is focussing on optimisation of cloud infrastructure services meeting demands from service providers, e.g. when public and private Clouds are federated in different configurations. Besides a number of other parameters like trust, risk, cost, data protection this optimisation also includes aspects of energy efficiency. This paper describes the standards-based approach of OPTIMIS for negotiating and creating Service Level Agreements between end-users or service providers and infrastructure providers regarding energy efficiency of a data centre.