Drowsy-DC, datacenter power management inspired by smartphones: poster

A lot of research work is put into reducing the power consumption of datacenters. Some works seek to improve the power efficiency of one server, but as of now the ideal state of power proportionality is only approached with a higher workload. Meanwhile, modern datacenters make use of the virtualization: the actual workload is materialized by virtual machines (VM). Thus, the problem shifts to consolidating VMs in order to increase the workload of a server. Roughly described, VM consolidation systems try to place as many VMs as possible, on as few servers as possible. Then, a server either gets a higher workload, bringing it closer to a state of energy proportionality; or hosts no VM and can be brought to sleep. However, industrial solutions are not very efficient, and in practice the number of VMs per server is increased by only 10%, with an effective workload rarely over 50% [3].