Bounding the Resource Savings of Utility Computing Models

In this paper we characterize resource usage in six data centers with approximately 1,000 servers. The results substantiate common knowledge that computing resources are typically under-utilized. Utility computing has been proposed as a way of increasing utilization and hence efficiency. Using an off-line integer programming model we bound the potential gain in efficiency for several different utility computing models. In a detailed study of a subset of the data center servers, we found that utility computing offered the potential to reduce the peak and mean number of CPUs needed by up to 53% and 79%, respectively. ∗This work was done as Post-Doctoral research at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.