Profit maximization and power management of green data centers supporting multiple slas

Abstract

While a large body of work has recently focused on reducing data center's energy expenses, there exists no prior work on investigating the trade-off between minimizing data center's energy expenditure and maximizing their revenue for various Internet and cloud computing services that they may offer. In this paper, we seek to tackle this shortcoming by proposing a systematic approach to maximize green data center's profit, i.e., revenue minus cost. In this regard, we explicitly take into account practical service-level agreements (SLAs) that currently exist between data centers and their customers. Our model also incorporates various other factors such as availability of local renewable power generation at data centers and the stochastic nature of data centers' workload. Furthermore, we propose an optimization-based profit maximization strategy for data centers for both cases, without and with behind-the-meter renewable generators. Using various experimental data and via computer simulations, we assess the accuracy of the proposed mathematical model for profit and also the performance of the proposed optimization-based profit maximization strategy.