Coordinated power reduction in multi-tenant colocation datacenter: An emergency demand response study

Even though demand response of datacenters recently has received increasing attention due to huge demands and flexible power control knobs, most of current studies focus on the owner-operated datacenters, leaving behind another critical segment of datacenter business: multi-tenant colocation. In colocation datacenters, while there exist multiple tenants who manage their own servers, the colocation operator only provides other facilities such as cooling, reliable power, and network connectivity. Therefore, colocation has its unique feature that challenges any attempts to design its demand response program: uncoordinated power management among tenants. To tackle this challenge, we consider incentive mechanisms that can coordinate tenants' power consumption for emergency demand response, where a fixed energy reduction target must be fulfilled. For two types of price-taking and price-anticipating tenants, we propose two incentive schemes with distributed algorithms that can achieve the same optimal social cost. Finally, trace-based simulations are also provided to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed incentive schemes.

I. Introduction

Demand response programs have been adopted in many countries to improve the reliability and efficiency of power grids. However, most of the research efforts have focused mainly on owner-operated datacenters (e.g., Google) [1]–[4], while paying less attention to colocation datacenters (e.g., Equinix), simply called colos, which is a crucial segment in datacenter industry. There are many reasons to advocate more research efforts on colos. First, with its critical role in datacenter business, colos provide a universal solution to all types of companies, especially for those neither want to build their own datacenters nor completely outsource their entire computing demands to any public cloud providers. For example, colos' customers diversely include Twitter, Wikipedia, Salesforce and Box [5]. Second, the growth of colos continues increasing sharply: currently there are more than 1200 colos in the U.S. alone [6], and the colos market is expected to grow from current $25 billions to$43 billions in the next five years [7]. Finally, colos are ideal contributors to the demand response programs: (i) colos also have extreme power demands, e.g., while colos have been shown to consume upto 40% datacenter energy in U.S, owner-operated datacenters like Google only take a portion of 8% [8]; (ii) Colos are often located in urban areas, e.g., Los Angeles [6] where demand responses are required more often than rural areas where owner-operated datacenters are typically situated, e.g., Google's datacenters [6].