Trends and effects of energy proportionality on server provisioning in data centers

Cloud is the state-of-the-art back-end infrastructure for most large-scale web services. This paper studies what effect energy proportionality has on the energy savings of cloud data center management, under various equipment compositions and power densities. Our findings show that although it is a common expectation that improved energy proportionality should diminish the benefits of power management's server provisioning, this is not true in all cases. Results show that equipping server provisioning with thermal awareness can keep it as a useful technique when the data center exhibits power consumption heterogeneity and non-uniform heat recirculation phenomena.