Patent ID: 8381221

Claim:
A computer implemented method for conserving energy at a data center comprising: repeatedly monitoring power consumption and temperature of a locally and physically limited group of resources, wherein the resources comprise at least one of server resources, storage resources, network resources, or application resources; determining one or more hot locations in the resource group having a temperature higher than a predetermined first threshold temperature; determining one or more cold locations in the resource group having a temperature lower than a predetermined second threshold temperature; repeatedly monitoring an instance specific workload fraction for a created service instance using one or more measurable technical parameters, the one or more measurable technical parameters comprising: CPU-MIPS consumption, frequency of cache hits and misses, frequency of disk accesses, network load, memory consumption, and memory bandwidth; repeatedly calculating a workload energy index (WEI) for the created service instance, the WEI describing heat creation potential for the service instance workload, calculating the WEI comprising defining a relation among service instance specific values, the service instance specific values comprising: the service instance specific workload fraction, and the total power consumption of one or more resources hosting the specific service instance; repeatedly monitoring and determining hot service instance workloads being run on the resources in the data center, the hot service instance workloads having a WEI higher than a predetermined first threshold WEI; repeatedly monitoring and determining cold service instance workloads being run on the resources in the data center, the cold service instance workloads having a WEI lower than a predetermined second threshold WEI; determining a relocation trigger event in dependence of the first and second threshold temperatures and the first and second threshold WEIs, the event having the functional meaning that a relocation of one or more service instance workloads is useful for lowering the temperature of a resource location; and in response to an occurrence of the relocation trigger event, initiating at least one of: a relocation of a hot service instance workload to a cold location, and a relocation of a cold service instance workload to a hot location, wherein relocation of a service instance workload does not exceed the maximum available resources of the location to which the service instance workload is relocated.