Optimal power and workload management for green data centers with thermal storage

Reducing the carbon footprint of data centers is becoming a primary goal of large IT companies. Due to the intermittency and unpredictability of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, it is quite challenging to utilize them in data centers. In this paper, we explore the opportunities offered by delay-tolerant workloads and thermal storage to facilitate the renewable energy integration in data centers and meanwhile, reduce the cost of using brown energy (i.e., energy from the utility grid). A stochastic optimization problem is formulated to tackle the stochastic renewable generation and workload arrival processes. Then, an online control algorithm based on the Lyapunov optimization approach is proposed to solve it. Simulation results based on the real-world traces show the effectiveness of the algorithm in practice.