Colocation Demand Response: Why Do I Turn Off My Servers?

Abstract

Data centers are promising participants in demand response programs (i.e., reducing a large electricity demand upon utility’s request), making power grid more stable and sustainable. In this paper, we focus on enabling colocation data center demand response. Colocation is an integral yet unique segment of data center industry, where multiple tenants house their servers in one shared facility. Nonetheless, differing from owner-operated data centers (e.g., Google), colocation data center suffers from “split incentive”: colocation operator desires demand response for financial incentives but has no control over tenants’ servers, while tenants who own the servers may not desire demand response due to lack of incentives. To break “split incentive”, we propose a first-of-its-kind incentive mechanism, called iCODE (incentivizing COlocation tenants for DEmand response), based on reverse auction: tenants, who voluntarily submit energy reduction bids to colocation operator, will be financially rewarded if their bids are accepted. We formally model how each tenant decides its bids and how colocation operator decides winning bids. We perform a trace-based simulation to evaluate iCODE. We show that iCODE can reduce colocation energy consumption by over 50% during demand response periods, unleashing the potential of colocation demand response.