A comprehensive approach to reduce the energy cost of network of datacenters

Several studies have proposed job migration over the wide area network (WAN) to reduce the energy of networks of datacenters by taking advantage of different electricity prices and load demands. Each study focuses on only a small subset of network parameters and thus their results may have large errors. For example, datacenters usually have long-term power contracts instead of paying market prices. However, previous work neglects these contracts, thus overestimating the energy savings by 2.3x. We present a comprehensive approach to minimize the energy cost of networks of datacenters by modeling performance of the workloads, power contracts, local renewable energy sources, different routing options for WAN and future router technologies. Our method can reduce the energy cost of datacenters by up to 28%, while reducing the error in the energy cost estimation by 2.6x.