Minimization of Costs and Energy Consumption in a Data Center by a Workload-Based Capacity Management

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach to improve power and cooling capacity management in a data center by taking into account knowledge about applications and workloads. We apply power capping techniques and proper cooling infrastructure configuration to achieve savings in energy and costs. To estimate values of a total energy consumption and costs we simulate both IT software/hardware and cooling infrastructure at once using the CoolEmAll SVD Toolkit. We also investigated the use of power capping to adjust data center operation to variable power supply and pricing. By better adjusting cooling infrastructure to specific types of workloads, we were able to find a configuration which resulted in energy, OPEX and CAPEX savings in the range of 4–25 %.