Utilization-based pricing for power management and profit optimization in data centers

Traditional load balancing approaches may spread the load on more computers as long as the performance in terms of response time or cost is minimized. Nowadays power is a growing cost factor for data centers. In this paper, from the service provider's point of view, the load balancing decision is made based on whether power consumption can be reduced or more profit can be earned. To achieve this, we design pricing algorithms to influence the load distribution. Both algorithms take into account the utilization of computers besides other factors, such as prices and power costs. In the first algorithm, we design pricing functions with respect to the computer utilization to encourage or discourage resource usage. In the second algorithm, we focus on the profit that a service provider can earn after deducting power cost from its revenue. We formulate this profit optimization problem and derive the optimum price solution. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.