TECH: A Thermal-Aware and Cost Efficient Mechanism for Colocation Demand Response

Data centers are promising participants in emergency demand response (EDR) programs, in which the power grids incentivize large energy consumers to reduce energy consumption in emergency to avoid potential huge financial losses. However, in multi-tenant colocation data centers, tenants manage their own servers and often sign fixed energy contracts with data center operators, thus having no incentives to contribute to EDR. To solve this problem, several studies have investigated various market-based mechanisms to incentivize tenants to reduce their server energy consumption for EDR. Nonetheless, these purely market-based studies are severely limited in one or both of the following key aspects. (1) Lack of coordination of cooling system: Due to thermal unawareness, the existing mechanisms leave the supplied cooling air temperature at an unnecessarily low level to avoid server overheating, resulting in cooling energy inefficiency (2) Violation of cost efficiency: The mechanism must be implemented in a cost efficient way such that operators do not lose financial interest, which, however, is violated by many of the existing mechanisms. This work proposes a novel thermal-aware and cost efficient mechanism, called TECH, which coordinate tenants' energy reduction in concert with the cooling system control to enable colocation EDR in a cost efficient way.