GreenGear: Leveraging and Managing Server Heterogeneity for Improving Energy Efficiency in Green Data Centers

In this paper, we propose GreenGear, the first heterogeneous strategy that incorporates wimpy servers into existing green data centers to dynamically deal with power mismatches. Our techniques exploit intelligent green power scheduling policies to provide efficiency-aware power management. We evaluate the GreenGear design on a prototype installed in a test-bed. Compared with a homogeneous server system, GreenGear is able to significantly increase the effective use of the renewable and battery power sources without the supplement of grid power, extending their runtime by 57%, lengthening the UPS lifetime by 2.04X, and improving renewable energy utilization by 51%.