Energy cost, the key challenge of today's data centers

Abstract

Historically, performance and price-performance of computer systems have been the key purchasing arguments for customers. With rising energy costs and increasing power use due to the ever-growing demand for computing power (servers, storage, networks), electricity bills have become a significant expense for today's data centers. In the very near future, energy efficiency is expected to be one of the key purchasing arguments. Some performance organizations, such as SPEC, have developed power benchmarks for single servers (SPECpower_ssj2008), but so far, no benchmark exists that measures the power consumption of transaction processing systems. In this paper, we develop a power consumption model based on data readily available in the TPC-C full disclosure report of published benchmarks. We verify our model with measurements taken from three fully scaled and optimized TPC-C configurations including client (middle-tier) systems, database server, and storage subsystem. By applying this model to a subset of 7 years of TPC-C results, we identify the most power-intensive components and demonstrate the existing power consumption trends over time. Assuming similar trends in the future, the hardware enhancements alone will not be able to satisfy the demand for energy efficiency. In its outlook, this paper looks at potential hardware and software enhancements to meet the energy efficiency demands of future systems. Realizing the importance of energy efficiency, the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has formed a working group to look into adding energy efficiency metrics to all its benchmarks. This paper is expected to complement this initiative.