Datacenter Power Management in Smart Grids

Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm and it is gaining wide popularity due to its benefits including reduced cost, ease of management, and increased reliability. In a cloud computing environment, companies or individuals offload their computing hardware/software/data to the cloud, which is supported by the computing infrastructure called datacenters. Datacenters consume large amounts of electricity to operate and bring enormous electricity bills to the operators. Associated carbon emissions from operating datacenters also cause significant negative impact to the environment. In the mean time, a new kind of electrical grid, called the smart grid, is emerging. Smart grids enable two way communications between the power generators and the power consumers. Smart grid technology brings many salient features to help deliver power efficiently and reliably. There are many research efforts addressing either of the two tracks above. Different with them, we consider both and focus on cost-aware datacenter power management in presence of smart grids. We review recent developments on this area in this article. It involves understanding how a smart grid operates, where power goes in datacenters, and most importantly, how to reduce the power cost and/or negative environmental impact when operating datacenters.