Energy and performance management in large data centers: A queuing theory perspective

With the increasing popularity of Internet services and cloud computing, both energy efficiency and performance guarantees are major concerns for data center operators. However, only a few of previous works elaborate the dynamic system working procedure while using specific mathematical methods to study on the relationship between the two characters. This paper addresses how to guarantee performance requirement in terms of waiting time so as to minimize power consumption by means of dynamic management policies that switch on/off a certain group of servers. We develop a mathematical model using queuing theory to determine activation thresholds of servers. Our scheme provides an analytical approach for studying the power-performance tradeoff in large data centers.