Service differentiation in multitier data centers

In this paper, we study the problem of resource allocation in the setting of multitier data centers. Our main motivation and objective is to provide applications hosted in the data center with different service levels. In such centers, there are several mechanisms the designer can use to achieve such objectives. We restrict our attention to CPU time at the service tier as the resource; the objective we consider is service differentiation, expressed as allocating prespecified percentages of this resource to applications. Then, mechanisms at the designer's disposal to provide desired service differentiation include the triplet of load balancing through the switch fabric, enqueueing at a server and scheduling at a server. We focus on the enqueueing component of control mechanisms. We provide, through analysis and simulations “rules of thumb” for situations where simple enqueueing policies can provide service differentiation.