Oasis: Scaling Out Datacenter Sustainably and Economically

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems 2017-07, Vol.28 (7), p.1960-1973
• Main Authors: Li, Chao, Hu, Yang, Gu, Juncheng, Yuan, Jingling, Li, Tao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Batteries; Carbon; Ceilings; Computational modeling; Cost control; Data center; Data centers; Data management; Electric power distribution; energy efficiency; Environmental impact; Expansion; Gases; Green products; Infrastructure; power management; Power supplies; Provisioning; scalabilty; Scaling; Servers
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2016.2615625

As big data applications proliferate, datacenters today are increasingly looking to adopt a scale-out model. Nevertheless, power capacity has become an important bottleneck that restricts horizontal scaling of servers, especially in datacenters that oversubscribe power infrastructure. When a datacenter hits its ceiling for power provisioning, conventionally the owner has to either build another facility or upgrade existing infrastructure-both approaches add huge cost, require significant time, and can further increase carbon footprint. This paper proposes Oasis, a novel datacenter expansion strategy that enables power-/carbon- constrained servers to scale out economically and sustainably. The basic structure of Oasis, called Oasis Node, naturally supports incremental capacity expansion with near-zero environmental impact since it leverages modular solar panels and distributed battery systems to power newly added servers. To optimize the operation of newly added nodes, we further propose a management framework called Ozone. It allows Oasis to jointly perform power supply switching and server speed scaling to improve efficiency locally and globally. We implement a prototype of Oasis and use it as a research platform for evaluating the design tradeoffs of green scale-out datacenters. With Oasis, a green datacenter could gradually double its capacity with near-oracle performance, extended battery lifetime, and 26 percent cost savings.