No "Power" Struggles: Coordinated Multi-Level Power Management for the Data Center

Power delivery, electricity consumption, and heat management are becoming key challenges in data center environments. Several past solutions have individually evaluated different techniques to address separate aspects of this problem, in hardware and software, and at local and global levels. Unfortunately, there has been no corresponding work on coordinating all these solutions. In the absence of such coordination, these solutions are likely to interfere with one another, in unpredictable (and potentially dangerous) ways. This paper seeks to address this problem. The author makes two key contributions. First, the author proposes and validates a power management solution that coordinates different individual approaches. Using simulations based on 180 server traces from nine different real-world enterprises, the author demonstrate the correctness, stability, and efficiency advantages of the solution.