Smart Data Center

All the internet services available these days are dependant and running in data centers. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft hosts millions of servers in their data centers to provide services to their users [19]. The enormous size of data centers leads to huge energy consumption. According to a news article, Google drew 260 MW of power in 2011 [6] that cost millions of dollars. Recently, the researchers have focused on reducing the data center energy cost. The researchers have focused on migration of the workload from one geographical location to another to use the time and location dependent electricity prices [2] [21]. Similarly, researchers have also focused on the use of Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) in data centers to shave off the peak power demands [24]. UPS has also been used to safe the data center from the unexpected power outages. The power outages also cost millions of dollars to data centers. Amazon was hit a severe power outage in 2012 that cost Amazon millions of dollars [17]. The modern smart grid provides the needed electricity to the data centers. Smart grids provide different pricing schemes for electricity based on different time scales [10, 18]. Due to huge electricity demands, the data centers acquires electricity from grids using long term contracts in day ahead market. The long term contracts cost lower than the real time market price of electricity [18]. In this paper, we propose the idea to buy electricity from more than one smart grid. The local power grid will act as the main power source for the data center. However, data center will also be powered by the remote grid with the surplus power. The data center can purchase the available surplus power from remote grids at lower prices than local grid long term