A novel approach to determining compute headroom on a server platform

The ability to perform performance and power aware workload placement in the datacenter is vital to optimizing overall operational efficiency of the IT as well as the infrastructure itself. Traditional methods of measuring workload performance such as Operating System (OS) based performance counters do not deliver a consistent picture of the intricate relationship between compute resource consumption and its impact on the power and thermal profile of the compute node. As a result, the traditional methods constitute a barrier to effectively optimizing compute resource consumption in a holistic manner in the datacenter, perpetuating the management silos that exist between Information Systems and the supporting infrastructure, and impacting optimization of the primary cost drivers of a datacenter and the integration of performance sensitive applications. In this paper we present a new metric to correlate compute resource consumption with power to provide insights into the computational efficiency of the node for improved workload placement. We provide the theoretical background, followed by demonstrative examples and data to showcase the efficacy of this new approach. We finally conclude with specific recommendations based on this approach to help data centers achieve resource optimization.