Autonomie multi-agent management of power and performance in data centers

The rapidly rising cost and environmental impact of energy consumption in data centers has become a multi-billion dollar concern globally. In response, the IT Industry is actively engaged in a first-to-market race to develop energy-conserving hardware and software solutions that do not sacrifice performance objectives. In this work we demonstrate a prototype of an integrated data center power management solution that employs server management tools, appropriate sensors and monitors, and an agent-based approach to achieve specified power and performance objectives. By intelligently turning off servers under low-load conditions, we can achieve over 25% power savings over the unmanaged case without incurring SLA penalties for typical daily and weekly periodic demands seen in webserver farms. Copyright © 2008, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.