Optimality analysis of energy-performance trade-off for server farm management

A central question in designing server farms today is how to efficiently provision the number of servers to extract the best performance under unpredictable demand patterns while not wasting energy. While one would like to turn servers off when they become idle to save energy, the large setup cost (both, in terms of setup time and energy penalty) needed to switch the server back on can adversely affect performance. The problem is made more complex by the fact that today's servers provide multiple sleep or standby states which trade off the setup cost with the power consumed while the server is `sleeping'. With so many controls, finding the optimal server farm management policy is an almost intractable problem

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PE
• Authors: Anshul Gandhi, Varun Gupta, Mor Harchol-Balter, Michael A. Kozuch
• Keywords: Demand Patterns, Optimization, PE 2010, Server Farm, Server Farm Management