POWER-AWARE ADAPTATION IN A DATA CENTER

A data center is disclosed with power-aware adaptation that minimizes the performance impact of reducing the power consumption of individual nodes in the data center. A data center according to the present techniques includes a request redirector that obtains an access request for data stored on a set of storage devices and that distributes the access request to one of a set of access nodes in response to a priority of the access request and a rank of each access node. A data center according to the present techniques also includes a power manager that performs a power adaptation in the data center by selecting access nodes for power reduction based on the ranks of the access nodes. The judicious distribution of access requests to appropriately ranked nodes and the judicious selection of access nodes for power reduction enhances the likelihood that higher priority cached data is not lost during power adaptation.