Technology with the Environment in Mind

Dynamic Data Center Power Management: Trends, Issues, and Solutions

INTRODUCTION

One of the biggest challenges for data center operators today is the increasing cost of power and cooling as a portion of the total cost of operations. As shown in Figure 1, over the past decade, the cost of power and cooling has increased 400%, and these costs are expected to continue to rise. In some cases, power costs account for 40-50% of the total data center operation budget. To make matters worse, there is still a need to deploy more servers to support new business solutions (Figure 2). Data centers are therefore faced with the twin problem of how to deploy new services in the face of rising power and cooling costs. In a recent survey of data centers (Figure 3), 59% identify power and cooling as the key factors limiting server deployment.

If these trends continue, the ability of data centers to deploy new services will be severely constrained. To overcome this constraint, data centers have three choices: expand power and cooling capacity, build new data centers, or employ a power management solution that maximizes the usage of existing capacity. The first two choices can be very expensive because they involve capital expenditure for purchasing and installing expensive new power delivery equipment. For this reason, the power management approach bears close examination, and this approach is the focus of the rest of our paper. For previous work in this area, the reader is referred to Felter et al. [4] who examine the benefits of dynamic power budget allocation, Femal [5] who examines the benefits of monitoring and coordinating power distribution to achieve higher application throughput, [6] where a framework to monitor power is discussed, and Bianchini [7] who presents a survey of energy management techniques by type of server system.

Figure 1: IDC Report of data center cost structure and trend
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Figure 2: Expected growth in server count
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Figure 3: Factors limiting server growth
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Our paper is organized as follows. In the next section we describe the current data center power allocation approach and the resulting problems; we follow this by proposing a new method for dealing with data center power allocation and describe the resulting server requirements; we then describe the role and functions of a platform resident Policy Manager (PM) and show how it addresses these requirements. Finally, we present the results of a PM Proof of Concept (PoC) and the benefits it offers data centers.

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