University of Michigan is about to publish a paper on PowerNap as a technique to save data center power.

PowerNap plan could save 75 percent of data center energy
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ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Putting idle servers to sleep when they're not in use is part of University of Michigan researchers' plan to save up to 75 percent of the energy that power-hungry computer data centers consume.

Data centers, central to the nation's cyberinfrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipment. Each time you make an ATM withdrawal, search the Internet or make a cell phone call, your request is routed through a data center.

Thomas Wenisch, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and students David Meisner and Brian Gold will present a paper about improving the energy efficiency of data center computer systems on March 10 at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Washington, D.C.

Wenisch and the students analyzed data center workloads and power consumption and used mathematical modeling to develop their approach.
The approach includes PowerNap, the plan to put idle servers to sleep, and RAILS, a more efficient power supplying technique. (RAILS stands for Redundant Array for Inexpensive Load Sharing.)