PADD: Power Aware Domain Distribution

Abstract

Modern data centers usually have computing resources sized to handle expected peak demand, but average demand is generally much lower than peak. This means that the systems in the data center usually operate at very low utilization rates. Past techniques have exploited this fact to achieve significant power savings, but they generally focus on centrally managed, throughput-oriented systems that process a single fine-grained request stream. We propose a more general solution — a technique to save power by dynamically migrating virtual machines and packing them onto fewer physical machines when possible. We call our scheme Power-Aware Domain Distribution (PADD). In this paper, we report on simulation results for PADD and demonstrate that the power and performance changes from using PADD are primarily dependent on how much buffering or reserve capacity it maintains. Our adaptive buffering scheme achieves energy savings within 7% of the idealized system that has no performance penalty. Our results also show that we can achieve an energy savings up to 70% with fewer than 1% of the requests violating their service level agreements.