Reducing data center power with server consolidation: Approximation and evaluation

With the growing costs of powering data centers, power management is gaining importance. Server consolidation in data centers, enabled by virtualization technologies, is becoming a popular option for organizations to reduce costs and improve manageability. While consolidation offers these benefits, it is important to ensure proper resource provisioning so that performance is not compromised. In addition to reducing the number of servers, there are other knobs - such as frequency/voltage scaling - that are being offered by recent hardware for finer granularity of power control. In this paper, we look at exploiting server consolidation and frequency/voltage control to reduce power consumption, while meeting certain provisioning guarantees. We formulate the problem as a variant of variable-sized bin packing. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and present an approximation algorithm for the same. The algorithm takes O(n² log n) time for n workloads, and has a provable approximation ratio. Experimental evaluation shows that in practice our algorithm obtains solutions very close (< 6.5% difference) to optimal.