Reducing wasted resources to help achieve green data centers

In this paper we introduce a new approach to the consolidation strategy of a data center that allows an important reduction in the amount of active nodes required to process a heterogeneous workload without degrading the offered service level. This article reflects and demonstrates that consolidation of dynamic workloads does not end with virtualization. If energy-efficiency is pursued, the workloads can be consolidated even more using two techniques, memory compression and request discrimination, which were separately studied and validated in previous work and are now to be combined in a joint effort. We evaluate the approach using a representative workload scenario composed of numerical applications and a real workload obtained from a top national travel website. Our results indicate that an important improvement can be achieved using 20% less servers to do the same work. We believe that this serves as an illustrative example of a new way of management: tailoring the resources to meet high level energy efficiency goals.