Managing Power Capacity as a First-Class Resource in Multi-Tenant Data Centers

Scaling up power infrastructures to accommodate growing data center demand is very costly and one of the biggest challenges faced by data centers today. In this paper, we propose to leverage market approaches for maximizing power capacity utilization in multi-tenant data centers, a crucial but under-explored type of data centers. Our study transforms the current practice that simply allocates power capacity in a fixed manner, into a dynamic, scalable, and coordinated market-based paradigm. To illustrate our design, we consider power oversubscription and study gracefully handling the occasional power emergencies in oversubscribed multi-tenant data centers. Concretely, we present a market approach, called COOrdinated Power management solution (COOP), which extracts tenants’ power reduction capabilities at runtime and judiciously coordinates tenants’ power reduction at a minimum performance cost.