UPS Node-Based Workload Management for Data Centers Considering Flexible Service Requirements

As the IT sector is rapidly growing all over the world, more and more energy is consumed by data centers, which leads to the continuous increase of operating costs. Among other factors, the load management among uninterruptible power supply (UPS) nodes should be considered in the energy management model of the data center since its energy efficiency is correlated with the load ratio. In this article, an energy management scheme of the data center, which focuses on the workload scheduling among UPS nodes, is proposed to improve its operation efficiency. The flexible service requirement of batch workloads is also modeled in the proposed scheme to illustrate the cost of flexibility. In the proposed scheme, the efficiency of the UPS node is modeled as a function of the load ratio. Meanwhile, the cost of inconvenience is introduced to represent the flexible service requirements of batch workloads. A stochastic formulation is established to address the uncertainties involved in the scheduling process. Simulated case studies are provided, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.