  Since the electricity bill of a data center constitutes a significant portion
of its overall operational costs, reducing this has become important. We
investigate cost reduction opportunities that arise by the use of uninterrupted
power supply (UPS) units as energy storage devices. This represents a deviation
from the usual use of these devices as mere transitional fail-over mechanisms
between utility and captive sources such as diesel generators. We consider the
problem of opportunistically using these devices to reduce the time average
electric utility bill in a data center. Using the technique of Lyapunov
optimization, we develop an online control algorithm that can optimally exploit
these devices to minimize the time average cost. This algorithm operates
without any knowledge of the statistics of the workload or electricity cost
processes, making it attractive in the presence of workload and pricing
uncertainties. An interesting feature of our algorithm is that its deviation
from optimality reduces as the storage capacity is increased. Our work opens up
a new area in data center power management.
