Managing Power Capacity as a First-Class Resource in Multitenant Data Centers

Scaling up power infrastructures to accommodate growing data center demand is a giant, costly challenge. As a solution, this article proposes market approaches for maximizing power capacity utilization in multitenant data centers, where tenants individually manage their physical servers and workloads. It turns the current practice, which allocates power capacity in a fixed manner, into a dynamic, scalable, and coordinated market-based paradigm. To illustrate the market design, this article considers a common practice of power oversubscription and presents COOP (COOrdinated Power management), which extracts tenants power reduction capabilities at runtime and gracefully handles power emergencies with minimum performance impact.