Minimizing Energy and Network Costs of Data Centers in China

Energy management is important in Data Center (DC) operation, because DC is highly energy-intensive and cost-sensitive. But it is not enough for the DC operators in China, as the bandwidth may cost more than the electricity and the power-saving effect of energy management may be canceled by the bandwidth variation. In this paper, an Operational Expenditure (OPEX) optimization algorithm is proposed for minimizing the overall energy and network costs of DC in China. It estimates the CPU and bandwidth requirements of each computing task, calculates the energy and network costs for executing the task in the respective DC, and selects the proper site with minimum overall cost and sufficient resources. A multi-site DC simulator is implemented for the evaluation in a scenario with 121 DC sites distributed over 35 areas. The simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm further reduces the DC OPEX by 6.7% compared with the energy-only algorithm.