BrownMap: Enforcing Power Budget in Shared Data Centers

Shared data centers that use virtualized servers as building blocks (e.g., clouds) are emerging as an exciting technology that provides a computational platform for customers without incurring a steep setup cost. The
providers of a shared data center, however, need intelligent mechanisms to deal with bursts in resource requirements as well as failures that may significantly reduce resource availability. In this work, we investigate mechanisms to ensure that a shared data center can operate within a power budget, while maximizing the overall revenue earned by the provider. We present the BrownMap methodology that is able to ensure that data centers can deal both with outages that reduce the available power or with surges in workload. BrownMap uses automatic VM resizing and Live Migration technologies to ensure that overall revenue of the provider is maximized, while meeting the budget. We implement BrownMap on an IBM Power6 cluster and study its effectiveness using a trace-driven evaluation of a real workload. Both theoretical and experimental evidence are presented that establish the efficacy of BrownMap to maximize revenue, while meeting a power budget for shared data centers.