Coordinated power reduction in multi-tenant colocation datacenter: An emergency demand response study

Even though demand response of datacenters recently has received increasing attention due to huge demands and flexible power control knobs, most of current studies focus on the owner-operated datacenters, leaving behind another critical segment of datacenter business: multi-tenant colocation. In colocation datacenters, while there exist multiple tenants who manage their own servers, the colocation operator only provides other facilities such as cooling, reliable power, and network connectivity. Therefore, colocation has its unique feature that challenges any attempts to design its demand response program: uncoordinated power management among tenants. To tackle this challenge, we consider incentive mechanisms that can coordinate tenants' power consumption for emergency demand response, where a fixed energy reduction target must be fulfilled. For two types of price-taking and price-anticipating tenants, we propose two incentive schemes with distributed algorithms that can achieve the same optimal social cost. Finally, trace-based simulations are also provided to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed incentive schemes.