BAAT: Towards Dynamically Managing Battery Aging in Green Datacenters

Abstract

Energy storage devices (batteries) have shown great promise in eliminating supply/demand power mismatch and reducing energy/power cost in green datacenters. These important components progressively age due to irregular usage patterns, which result in less effective capacity and even pose serious threat to server availability. Nevertheless, prior proposals largely ignore the aging issue of batteries or simply use ad-hoc discharge capping to extend their lifetime. To fill this critical void, we thoroughly investigate battery aging on a heavily instrumented prototype over an observation period of six months. We propose battery anti-aging treatment (BAAT), a novel framework for hiding, reducing, and planning the battery aging effects. We show that BAAT can extend battery lifetime by 69%. It enables datacenters to maximally utilize energy storage resources to enhance availability and boost performance. Moreover, it reduces 26% battery cost and allows datacenters to economically scale in the big data era.