Extending Energetic Potential of Data Centers to Participate in Smart Grid Networks

Abstract : Data centers are growing due to the increasing demand of new and growing IT services. Following these trends, the electrical power consumption in data centers becomes a significant value. In parallel, an increasing share of renewable and volatile power sources needs to be handled in power networks due to the energy transition in Germany. To compensate the volatile behavior of renewables, appropriate actions are needed.To take advantage of these issues, we present our approach to adapt the data center’s power consumption. In our previous work, we pointed out the effects of applying different virtual machine allocation to data centers and to effect the server’s power consumption. According to this approach, a controllable amount of power can be a valuable contribution to smart grid networks to keep power networks stable. In this paper, we propose our approach basing on server virtualization technology to adapt the data center’s power consumption up to 50%. The approach is suitable in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments.