RED-BL: Energy solution for loading data centers
Muhammad Saqib Ilyas, Saqib Raza, Chao-Chih Chen, Zartash Afzal Uzmi, Chen‐Nee Chuah · 2012
Cloud infrastructure providers and data center operators spend a major portion of their operations budget on the electric bills. We present RED-BL (Relocate Energy Demand to Better Locations), a framework for determining an optimal mapping of workload to an existing set of data centers while considering the cost of workload relocation. Within each workload mapping interval, RED-BL solution exploits the geo diversity in electricity price markets. The temporal diversity in those markets is simultaneously exploited by considering a planning window comprising several mapping intervals. Using workload traces from live Internet applications and electricity prices from the US markets, RED-BL can reduce the electric bill by as much as 81% from the case when the workload is equally distributed. Compared to a single data center deployment, an average reduction of 27% in electric bill can be achieved when RED-BL uses 10 or more data centers, a common case for most operators. When compared to existing workload relocation solutions, RED-BL achieves a further reduction of 13.63%, on average. While modest, this reduction can save millions of dollars for the operators. The cost of this saving is an inexpensive computation at the start of each planning window.