A Survey on Power Management Techniques for Oversubscription of Multi-Tenant Data Centers

Abstract

Power management for data centers has been extensively studied in the past 10 years. Most research has focused on owner-operated data centers with less focus on Multi-Tenant Data Centers (MTDC) or colocation data centers. In an MTDC, an operator owns the building and leases out space, power, and cooling to tenants to install their own IT equipment. MTDC’s present new challenges for data center power management due to an inherent lack of coordination between the operator and tenants. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive survey of existing MTDC power management techniques for demand response programs, sustainability, and/or power hierarchy oversubscription. Power oversubscription is of particular interest, as it can maximize resource utilization, increase operator profit, and reduce tenant costs. We create a taxonomy to classify and compare key works. Our taxonomy and review differ from existing works in that our emphasis is on safe power oversubscription, which has been neglected in previous surveys. We propose future research for prediction and control of power overload events in an oversubscribed MTDC.