DUAL: Reliability-Aware Power Management in Data Centers

A virtualized data center hosts users and applications within a large number of virtual machines (VM) to achieve easy provisioning and high utilization of physical resources. Energy efficiency and reliability are two primary concerns for operating a data center. Power saving techniques, such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), are often employed to reduce the supply voltages of the CPUs in runtime when the computer system utilization is low. However, DVFS can potentially decrease the system reliability - the processors at low voltages are more likely to encounter soft errors that may result in VM or system crashes. In this work, we propose a data center management framework, DUAL, which consists of the new virtual machine power and reliability analysis tools. The framework is designed to balance the dual needs of a data center: reducing energy consumption and providing high reliability. The evaluations show that DUAL can help maintain the desired reliability and significantly reduce power consumption, which in turn will lower the overall operational cost of a data center.