Energy management for the homogeneous server clusters offering web services

Abstract

The population of the Internet users has exceeded 2.4 billion. Data centers provide Internet services to fulfill the demand from these users. Many data centers adopt the cluster-based server systems to host the required Internet services. These server systems consume significant amount of energy, but much of the power is used to maintain service capacity during idle or low workload periods. This paper surveys some recent approaches addressing this issue. As learned from the traditional telephone call center planning processes, a queueing model is adopted to model the server clusters with homogeneous architecture. By analyzing the model, a set of the factors affecting the energy cost is identified. Based on the identified factors, an on-line energy management technique is then deigned. The proposed approach is simulated with a real-world workload trace. The simulation result shows that approximately 70 to 75 % of the originally consumed energy can be saved.