Reducing the expenses of geo-distributed data centers with portable containerized modules

In order to maximize their profits, big IT companies need to reduce the operating expenses (OpEx) and capital expenses (CapEx) of their geo-distributed data centers. To reduce OpEx, recent studies have proposed algorithms that dynamically dispatch workload among different data center sites, to exploit the variability in local electricity price and green energy availability. However, the amount of OpEx savings achieved by workload dispatching is often limited by the local computing capacity. To reduce CapEx, data centers try to minimize the needed increases in size based on estimated workload growth. However, workload overestimation would result in a high CapEx, while underestimation would hurt business increases.In this paper, we propose ExContainer, a novel strategy that leverages portable containerized modules to minimize both OpEx and CapEx for geo-distributed data centers. With ExContainer, containers are allocated monthly to different sites and workload is dispatched hourly, to minimize total OpEx. To cut CapEx, ExContainer finds the best trade-off between the degree of capacity expansion and the number of needed new containers to handle the workload peak. We evaluate ExContainer with real-world traces. Our experimental results show that compared to state-of-the-art solutions, ExContainer allows significant reduction in both OpEx and CapEx.