Evaluation of Advanced Data Centre Power Management Strategies

In recent work, we proposed a new specification language for power management strategies as an extension to our AnyLogic-based simulation framework for the trade-off analysis of power and performance in data centres. In this paper, we study the quality of such advanced power management strategies based on both power and performance measurement data collected during system operation. These strategies take a wide variety of state variables into account. In order to ensure the quality of new strategies, they are studied for stability, efficiency, adaptability and robustness; these qualities will be formally defined. This paper presents an evaluation approach for these qualities for several power management strategies inspired by strategies presented in the literature (and extensions thereof). We show that the choice of power management strategy depends both on which qualities are given the highest priority and on the used state information. The new power management strategies show significant reductions in energy consumption in our case of up to 54% energy (compared to an “always on” strategy) for a typical data centre workload for a small 30-server cluster.