Free cooling-aware dynamic power management for green datacenters

Free cooling, i.e., directly using outside cold air and/or water to cool down datacenters, can provide significant power savings of datacenters. However, due to the limited cooling capability, which is tightly coupled with climate conditions, free cooling is currently used only in limited locations (e.g., North Europe) and periods of the year. Moreover, the applicability of free cooling is further restricted along with the conservative assumption on workload characteristics and the virtual machine (VM) consolidation technique as they require to provision higher cooling capability. This paper presents a dynamic power management scheme, which extends the applicability of free cooling by judiciously consolidating VMs exploiting time-varying workload characteristics of datacenter as well as climate conditions, in order to minimize the power consumption of the entire datacenter while satisfying service-level agreement (SLA) requirements. Additionally, we propose the use of a receding horizon control scheme in order to prevent frequent cooling mode transitions. Experimental results show that the proposed solution provides up to 25.7% power savings compared to conventional free cooling decision schemes, which uses free cooling only when the outside temperature is lower than predefined threshold temperature.