Energy-aware application performance management in virtualized data centers

Both performance and energy cost are important concerns for current data center operators. Traditionally, however, IT and mechanical engineers have separately optimized the cyber and physical aspects of data center operations. This paper considers both of these aspects with the eventual goal of developing performance and power management techniques that operate holistically to control the entire cyber-physical complex of data center installations. Toward this end, we propose a balance of payments model for holistic power and performance management. As an example of coordinated cyber-physical system management, the energy-aware cyber-physical system (EaCPS) uses an application controller on the cyber side to guarantee application performance, and on the physical side, it utilizes electric current-aware capacity management (CACM) to smartly place executables to reduce the energy consumption of each chassis present in a data center rack. A web application, representative of a multi-tier web site, is used to evaluate the performance of the controller on the cyber side, the CACM control on the physical side, and the holistic EaCPS methods in a mid-size instrumented data center. Results indicate that coordinated EaCPS outperforms separate cyber and physical control modules.