Hybrid resource provisioning for minimizing data center SLA violations and power consumption

This paper presents a practical and systematic approach to correctly provision server resources in data centers, such that SLA violations and energy consumption are minimized. In particular, we describe a hybrid method for server provisioning. Our method first applies a novel discretization technique on historical workload traces to identify long-term workload demand patterns that establish a "base" load. It then employs two techniques to dynamically allocate capacity: predictive provisioning handles the predicted base load at coarse time scales (e.g., hours) and reactive provisioning handles any excess workload at finer time scales (e.g., minutes). The combination of predictive and reactive provisioning achieves a significant improvement in meeting SLAs, conserving energy and reducing provisioning cost. We implement and evaluate our approach using traces from four production systems. The results show that our approach can provide up to 35% savings in power consumption and reduce SLA violations by as much as 21% compared to existing techniques, while avoiding frequent power cycling of servers.