Understanding and Abstracting Total Data Center Power

The alarming growth of data center power consumption has led to a surge in research activity on data center energy efficiency. Though myriad, most existing energy-efficiency efforts focus narrowly on a single data center subsystem. Sophisticated power management increases dynamic power ranges and can lead to complex interactions among IT, power, and cooling systems. However, reasoning about total data center power is difficult because of the diversity and complexity of this infrastructure. In this paper, we develop an analytic framework for modeling total data center power. We collect power models from a variety of sources for each critical data center component. These component-wise models are suitable for integration into a detailed data center simulator that tracks subsystem utilization and interaction at fine granularity. We outline the design for such a simulator. Furthermore, to provide insight into average data center behavior and enable rapid back-of-theenvelope reasoning, we develop abstract models that replace key simulation steps with simple parametric models. To our knowledge, our effort is the first attempt at a comprehensive framework for modeling total data center power.