A Barely Alive Memory Servers: Keeping Data Active in a Low-Power State

Current resource provisioning schemes in Internet services leave servers less than 50% utilized almost all the time. At this level of utilization, the servers’ energy efficiency is substantially lower than at peak utilization. A solution to this problem could be dynamically consolidating workloads into fewer servers and turning others off. However, services typically resist doing so, because of high response times during reactivation in handling traffic spikes. Moreover, services often want the memory and/or storage of all servers to be readily available at all times. In this paper, we propose a family of barely-alive active low-power server states that facilitates both fast re-activation and access to memory while in a low-power state. We compare these states to previously proposed active and idle states. In particular, we investigate the impact of load bursts in each energy-saving scheme. We also evaluate the additional benefits of memory access under low-power states with a study of a search service using a cooperative main-memory cache. Finally, we propose a system that combines a barelyalive state with the off state. We find that the barely-alive states can reduce service energy consumption by up to 38%, compared to an energy-oblivious system. We also find that these energy savings are consistent across a large parameter space.