Resource Allocation Optimization in a Data Center with Energy Storage Devices

As cloud computing is becoming the new generation of computing paradigm because of its many attractive attributes, huge data centers are built and operated to host the cloud services. Since these data centers usually incur a high electricity bill, the problem of reducing the electricity cost and maximizing the profit for a data center operator arises naturally. Because of the trend of dynamic pricing policies in the energy market, in which the electricity price changes across different hours of a day, the use of energy storage devices, such as batteries and supercapacitors, in a data center can be extended in addition to judicious computing/memory/storage resource management policies as another way to cut down on the operational cost. In this paper, we formulate a generalized optimization problem to minimize the linear combination of the electricity cost and the average request response time in a data center with energy storage devices. Solutions based on convex optimization techniques are proposed and the experimental results are discussed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation and the solution methods.