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Energy efficiency is increasingly important for future information and communication technologies (ICT), because the increased usage of ICT, together with increasing energy costs and the need to reduce green house gas emissions call for energy-efficient technologies that decrease the overall energy consumption of computation, storage and communications. Cloud computing has recently received considerable attention, as a promising approach for delivering ICT services by improving the utilization of data centre resources. In principle, cloud computing can be an inherently energy-efficient technology for ICT provided that its potential for significant energy savings that have so far focused on hardware aspects, can be fully explored with respect to system operation and networking aspects. Thus this paper, in the context of cloud computing, reviews the usage of methods and technologies currently used for energy-efficient operation of computer hardware and network infrastructure. After surveying some of the current best practice and relevant literature in this area, this paper identifies some of the remaining key research challenges that arise when such energy-saving techniques are extended for use in cloud computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]