Exploiting Virtual Energy Storage to Improve Power Oversubscription in Colocation Data Centers

For a colocation data center with power oversubscription, its power capacity can be inadequate when the power loads of all the tenants peak simultaneously, due to lack of collaboration. In this paper, we point out that such simultaneous power peaks can be common and regular challenges rather than occasional events. To address the problem, we propose to exploit the virtual energy storage device (vESD) as an incentive mechanism in the pricing of rent rates and energy costs, to guide the power management of their tenants and eliminate the regular simultaneous power peaks. In addition, we design a dynamic allocation and pricing strategy to support the tenants to flexibly rent vESD for their respective cost optimization, and the fairness is guaranteed with Nash Equilibrium. The experiments based on real-world data center traces show that using vESD can improve the utilization of power infrastructures and save the provisioning costs by 32%.