A market approach for handling power emergencies in multi-tenant data center

Abstract

Power oversubscription in data centers may occasionally trigger an emergency when the aggregate power demand exceeds the capacity. Handling such an emergency requires a graceful power capping solution that minimizes the performance loss. In this paper, we study power capping in a multi-tenant data center where the operator supplies power to multiple tenants that manage their own servers. Unlike owner-operated data centers, the operator lacks control over tenants' servers. To address this challenge, we propose a novel market mechanism based on supply function bidding, called COOP, to financially incentivize and coordinate tenants' power reduction for minimizing total performance loss (quantified in performance cost) while satisfying multiple power capping constraints. We build a prototype to show that COOP is efficient in terms of minimizing the total performance cost, even compared to the ideal but infeasible case that assumes the operator has full control over tenants' servers. We also demonstrate that COOP is "win-win", increasing the operator's profit (through oversubscription) and reducing tenants' cost (through financial compensation for their power reduction during emergencies).