Power Management of Server Farms
Giuseppe Iazeolla, Alessandra Pieroni · Applied Mechanics and Materials · 2014
The power management of server farms (Sf) is becoming a relevant problem in economical terms. Server farms totalize millions of servers all over the world that need to be electrically powered. Research is thus expected to investigate into methods to reduceSfpower consumption. However, saving power may turn into waste of performance (highresponse_times), in other words, into waste ofSfQuality of Service (QoS). By use of aSfmodel, this paper investigatesSfpower management strategies that look at compromises between power-saving and QoS. Various optimizingSfpower managementpoliciesare studied combined with the effects of job queueingdisciplines. The (policy, discipline) pairs, orstrategies, that optimize theSfpower consumption (minimum absorbed Watts), theSfperformance (minimumresponse_time), and theSfperformance-per-Watt (minimumresponse_time-per-Watt) are identified.By use of the model, the work the server-manager has to do to direct hisSfis greatly simplified, since the universe of all possible (strategies he needs to choose from is drastically reduced to a very small set of most significant strategies.