Energy storage in datacenters: What, where, and how much?

Di Wang, Chuangang Ren, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Hosam Fathy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

152 Scopus citations

Abstract

Energy storage - in the form of UPS units - in a datacenter has been primarily used to fail-over to diesel generators upon power outages. There has been recent interest in using these Energy Storage Devices (ESDs) for demand-response (DR) to either shift peak demand away from high tariff periods, or to shave demand allowing aggressive under-provisioning of the power infrastructure. All such prior work has only considered a single/specific type of ESD (typically re-chargeable lead-acid batteries), and has only employed them at a single level of the power delivery network. Continuing technological advances have provided us a plethora of competitive ESD options ranging from ultra-capacitors, to different kinds of batteries, flywheels and even compressed air-based storage. These ESDs offer very different trade-offs between their power and energy costs, densities, lifetimes, and energy efficiency, among other factors, suggesting that employing hybrid combinations of these may allow more effective DR than with a single technology. Furthermore, ESDs can be placed at different, and possibly multiple, levels of the power delivery hierarchy with different associated trade-offs. To our knowledge, no prior work has studied the extensive design space involving multiple ESD technology provisioning and placement options. This paper intends to fill this critical void, by presenting a theoretical framework for capturing important characteristics of different ESD technologies, the trade-offs of placing them at different levels of the power hierarchy, and quantifying the resulting cost-benefit trade-offs as a function of workload properties.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGMETRICS/Performance 2012 - Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance, Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
Pages187-198
Number of pages12
Edition1 SPEC. ISS.
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event12th Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance 2012 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: Jun 11 2012Jun 15 2012

Publication series

NamePerformance Evaluation Review
Number1 SPEC. ISS.
Volume40
ISSN (Print)0163-5999

Other

Other12th Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period6/11/126/15/12

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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