Power management in virtualized datacenter – A survey

Abstract

With growth in internet usage, increase in user demands, increase in applications or services due to technology advances (virtualization) and new set of business models (cloud computing), datacenters’ are growing in numbers and size. This datacenter growth, additionally contributes to increased energy consumption and thereby contributing to increased electricity cost and the concerns about the environmental impacts.Traditionally, computing systems were designed and developed to improve and meet performance demands of application or services. However, the increase in datacenter energy consumption and carbon footprint environmental impacts are real practical concerns. Therefore, the goal of the computing system design now is to optimally minimize power consumption and improve energy efficiency.This paper presents a survey of energy-efficient design of computing systems covering techniques used at hardware, virtualization, server heterogeneity and thermal levels. In this paper, we highlight the need to have a holistic view of power consumption of both IT and non-IT systems to achieve energy efficiency in datacenters.