Energy-aware application performance management in virtualized data centers

Both performance and energy cost are impor- tant concerns for current data center operators. Traditionally, however, IT and mechanical engineers have separately op- timized the cyber and physical aspects of data center operations. This paper considers both of these aspects with the eventual goal of developing performance and power management techniques that operate holistically to control the entire cyber-physical complex of data center installations. Toward this end, we propose a balance of payments model for holis- tic power and performance management. As an example of coordinated cyber-physical system management, the energy- aware cyber-physical system （EaCPS） uses an application controller on the cyber side to guarantee application perfor- mance, and on the physical side, it utilizes electric current- aware capacity management （CACM） to smartly place exe- cutables to reduce the energy consumption of each chassis present in a data center rack. A web application, representa- tive of a multi-tier web site, is used to evaluate the perfor- mance of the controller on the cyber side, the CACM control on the physical side, and the holistic EaCPS methods in a mid-size instrumented data center. Results indicate that coor- dinated EaCPS outperforms separate cyber and physical con- trol modules.