RE-UPS: an adaptive distributed energy storage system for dynamically managing solar energy in green datacenters

Abstract

Datacenters, the essential infrastructures for supercomputing and cloud computing, are facing increasing pressure of capping tremendous power consumption and carbon emission. Many studies have proposed to leverage energy storage devices to shave peak power or smooth intermittent power for datacenters, respectively. However, a joint energy management of peak shaving and renewable energy harvesting in datacenters is still lacking. In this paper, we propose a new power management scheme named RE-UPS, which explores the opportunity to shave datacenter peak power demand with renewable energy. RE-UPS is based on the emerging distributed energy storage architecture and existing UPS infrastructure of datacenter. It further leverages a dynamic heuristic algorithm to determine the appropriate energy storage allocation and server power sources. The proposed energy management policies can greatly optimize the design among maximizing renewable energy harvest, shaving peak power, and maintaining UPS energy availability. Compared to the baseline power management schemes, RE-UPS can averagely improve backup energy capacity by 28 %, extend battery lifetime by 42 %, increase green energy utilization by 78 %, and reduce workload performance degradation by 13 %.