Some practical aspects in modeling server clusters with blocks of reserve servers

Abstract

Calculating the energy consumption plays an important role in planning as well as in managing the server clusters. It attracted many rescarchers in proposing the approaches to effectively reduce the energy consumption costs. However, some of these researchers have omitted several practical aspects with regard to the operation of servers when modeling their models. As a consequence, they may not have adequate facts for calculating the amount of electrical energy consumed by servers. This paper has investigated the impact of some practical aspects in the operation of servers on calculating the time that the servers consume energy. Three different aspects are considered: S1) the avoidance of turning off the server during the setup process, S2) the separate switching times required for each server, and S3) the necessity of allowing for the shutdown time of each server. The results show that, the assumption for turning off the server during its setup process should be caretully applied. Additionally, we might omit the shutdown time while still keeping the accuracy of models.