ECCO: An integrated solution for Environment Compatible COmputing systems

Large data centers have costs of implementation and management generally very high and a significant part of these costs are related to energy consumption. In addition, Governments, in the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, push to adopt in the coming years more responsible behavior towards the environment implementing energy-saving strategies also in the management of big Data Centers. Thus, if some actions to reduce the energy impact on the overall costs for large Data Centers can not be postponed, it is also indispensable to take into account the needs of users that thanks to the use of these resources contribute to the advancement of science in strategic, and generally mission-critical, scientific areas. Here we report the experience made for the realization of a complex and modular system, named ECCO, able to automatically and dynamically redefine the set of active resources of a Data Center with the purpose of drastically reducing the energy costs without "too much" neglecting the needs of users. Some issues related to the deploy and the validation of some components of the ECCO system are reported focusing on the real case study of the S.Co.P.E data center at the University of Naples Federico II.