A dynamic power management controller for optimizing servers' energy consumption in service centers

Abstract

This paper proposes the development of a management controller, which balances the service center servers' workload and hardware resources usage to locally optimize energy consumption. The controller exploits energy saving opportunities due to short-term fluctuations in the performance request levels of the server running tasks. The paper proposes Dynamic Power Management strategies for processor and hard disks which represent the main elements of the controller energy consumption optimization process. We propose techniques for identifying the over-provisioned resources and putting them into low-power states until there is a prediction for a workload requiring scaling-up the server's computing capacity. Virtualization techniques are used for a uniform and dependence free management of server tasks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.