Green Hierarchical Management for Distributed Datacenter Containers

In recent years, modular datacenters (datacenter containers) have become promising IT infrastructure solutions due to their impressive efficiency and scalability. Pre-fabricated containers can be deployed not only in existing warehouse-scale datacenter facilities for capacity expansion, but also in urban/remote areas to support onsite Internet of Things (IoT) data processing. Combing conventional centralized datacenter servers with distributed containers can offer cloud providers new opportunities of exploiting local renewable energy resources and reducing unnecessary data movement overhead. This paper investigates a hierarchical management strategy for emerging geographically distributed datacenter containers. We logically group distributed datacenter containers into multiple classes that have different data accessing patterns. During runtime a central navigation system is used to monitor the utilization of each container class and perform dynamic sleeping scheduling to further improve the overall energy efficiency. Experimental results on our scaled-down test-bed show that the proposed mechanism can save 12%~32% energy cost while ensuring high performance.