Exploiting thermal energy storage to reduce data center capital and operating expenses

Abstract

Power shaving has recently been proposed to dynamically shave the power peaks of a data center with energy storage devices (ESD), such that more servers can be safely hosted. In addition to the reduction of capital investment (cap-ex), power shaving also helps cut the electricity bills (op-ex) of a data center by reducing the high utility tariffs related to peak power. However, existing work on power shaving focuses exclusively on electrical ESDs (e.g., UPS batteries) to shave the server-side power demand. In this paper, we propose TE-Shave, a generalized power shaving framework that exploits both UPS batteries and a new knob, thermal energy storage (TES) tanks equipped in many data centers. Specifically, TE-Shave utilizes stored cold water or ice to manipulate the cooling power, which accounts for 30-40% of the total power cost of a data center. Our extensive evaluation with real-world workload traces shows that TE-Shave saves cap-ex and op-ex up to $2,668/day and $825/day, respectively, for a data center with 17,920 servers. Even for future data centers that are projected to have more efficient cooling and thus a smaller portion of cooling power, e.g., a quarter of today's level, TE-Shave still leads to 28% more savings than existing work that focuses only on the server-side power. TE-Shave is also coordinated with traditional TES solutions for further reduced op-ex.