Online server and workload management for joint optimization of electricity cost and carbon footprint across data centers

Internet data centers, typically distributed across the world in order to provide timely and reliable Internet service, have been increasingly pressurized to reduce their carbon footprint and electricity cost. Particularly, data centers will soon be required to abide by carbon capping polices which impose carbon footprint limits to encourage brown energy conservation. We propose an online algorithm, called OnlineCC, for minimizing the operational cost while satisfying the carbon footprint reduction target of a set of geo-distributed data centers. OnlineCC makes use of Lyapunov optimization technique while operating without long-term future information, making it attractive in the presence of uncertainties associated with data center information e.g., input workload. We prove that OnlineCC achieves a near optimal operational cost (electricity cost) compared to the optimal algorithm with future information, while bounding the potential violation of carbon footprint target, depending on the Lyapunov control parameter, namely V. We also give a heuristic for finding V which significantly shortens the search space to adjust its value. Finally, we perform a trace-based simulation study and a small scale experiment to complement the analysis. The results show that OnlineCC reduces cost by more than 18% compared to a prediction-based online solution while resulting in equal or smaller carbon footprint.