Joint Server and Network Energy Saving in Data Centers for Latency-Sensitive Applications

Achieving energy proportionality in data centers supporting latency-sensitive applications is challenging because of the strict Service Level Agreements. Previous works individually focus on making the server energy proportional or reducing the data center network's power consumption for latency-tolerant applications. In this paper, we propose EPRONS to minimize the overall data center's power consumption with latency-sensitive applications by trading-off network slack in favor of providing additional slack for computations. We utilize the linear programming model to consolidate latency-sensitive search queries and latency-tolerant background flows to a minimal subnet of the topology by turning off unused switches and links without violating the application deadlines. Servers take advantage of the additional 'network-provided' slack to allow slowing down request processing. For servers, we design a novel power saving technique using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) based on the average tail latency of a request. If needed, we turn on a minimal number of additional network links and switches to reduce network latency while still maximizing entire data center's power saving. Experimental results show that our scheme saves up to 31.25% of a data center's total power budget.