ABSTRACT
The amount of data that are computed, stored, and communicated by data centres has been increasing for years and will keep on increasing. One of the consequences of this phenomenon is the deployment of a considerable number of high-capacity servers each year. In contrast, several independent studies reveal that resources (including energy) are not optimally utilised in most existing data centres. The introduction of server virtualisation and cloud computing promises an efficient resource utilisation because they enable the dynamic consolidation of workloads. This chapter discusses and experimentally demonstrates the scope of different dynamic power management strategies (dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, load balancing, and workload consolidation) in data centres. It also introduces the HAECubie demonstrator we developed to quantitatively analyse the relationship between energy/power consumption and the utility (performance) that can be achieved through workload consolidation.
