An opportunity to improve Data Center Efficiency: Optimizing the Server's Upgrade Cycle

Abstract: This work aims to improve a data center's efficiency by optimizing the server upgrade plan: determine the optimal timing for replacing old servers with new ones. The opportunity presented by this approach is demonstrated through a study based on historical server data. The study establishes a significant opportunity to increase the QPS/(TCOxCO2) metric by formulating a global upgrade plan at the data center's design time covering its entire life cycle. This plan leverages information, such as server entry year, performance, and active power consumption for both existing and future servers. Our findings reveal that an optimal global upgrade plan, may involve upgrades at non fixed time periods and outperforms local upgrade plans. Local upgrade plans follow a fixed, equal-length cycle and make decisions based only on currently available server models. These local plans select the best available server at each upgrade cycle without accounting for future server releases.