Dynamic Server Provisioning for Data Center Power Management
Anshul Gandhi · 2013
Data centers play an important role in today’s IT infrastructure. However, their enormous power consumption makes them very expensive to operate. Sadly, much of the power used by data centers is wasted because of poor capacity management, leading to low server utilization. In order to reduce data center power consumption, researchers have proposed several dynamic server provisioning approaches. However, there are many challenges that hinder the successful deployment of dynamic server provisioning, including: (i) unpredictability in workload demand, (ii) switching costs when setting up new servers, and (iii) unavailability of data when provisioning stateful servers. Most of the existing research in dynamic server provisioning has ignored, or carefully sidestepped, these important challenges at the expense of reduced benefits. In order to realize the full potential of dynamic server provisioning, we must overcome these associated challenges. This