Drowsy-DC: Data Center Power Management System

Abstract

In a modern data center (DC), the large majority of costs arise from the energy consumption. The most popular technique used to mitigate this issue in a virtualized DC is the virtual machine (VM) consolidation. Although the latter may increase server utilization by about 5-10%, it is difficult to actually notice server loads greater than 50%. By analyzing the traces from our cloud provider partner, confirmed by previous research work, we have identified that some VMs have sporadic periods of data computation followed by large intervals of idleness. These VMs often hinder the consolidation system to further increase the energy efficiency of the DC. In this paper we propose a novel DC power management system called Drowsy-DC, which is able to identify the aforementioned VMs that have similar periods of idleness. Further, these VMs are colocated on the same server so that their idle periods are exploited to put the server to a low power mode (suspend to RAM) until some data computation is required. By introducing a negligible overhead, our system is able to improve any VM consolidation system (up to 81% for OpenStack Neat).