Towards Energy Efficient Change Management in a Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

The continuously increasing cost of managing IT systems has led many companies to outsource their commercial services to external hosting centers. Cloud computing has emerged as one of the enabling technologies that allow such external hosting efficiently. Like any IT environment, a Cloud Computing environment requires high level of maintenance to be able to provide services to its customers. Replacing defective items (hardware/software), applying security patches, or upgrading firmware are just a few examples of the typical maintenance procedures needed in such environments. While taking resources down for maintenance, applying efficient change management techniques is a key factor to the success of the cloud. As energy has become a precious resource, research has been conducted towards devising protocols that minimize energy consumption in IT systems. In this paper, we propose a pro-active energy efficient technique for change management in cloud computing environments. We formulate the management problem into an optimization problem that aims at minimizing the total energy consumption of the cloud. Our proposed approach is pro-active in the sense that it takes prior SLA (Service Level Agreement) requests into account while determining time slots in which changes should take place.

Cooperative Resource Management in a IaaS

“…(3) Allocation of a new VM: if the two previous solutions cannot be applied because of the free-resource constraints (1,5), the IaaSManager creates a VM V n with α n = ∆ q and asks the AppManager to deploy an application instance on it.…”

“…They generally implement a resource manager which is responsible for dynamically reducing the amount of used resource. At the level of the customer, such a resource manager allocates and deallocates VMs according to applications' needs at runtime to deal with different load situations and to minimize resource cost [1]. At the provider level, the resource manager relies on VM migration to gather VMs on a reduced set of machines (according to VMs' loads) in order to switch unused machines off, thus implementing a consolidation [8], [13] strategy.…”

Approaches to Cloud Computing in the Public Sector

“…They will also benefit financially because running less hardware means reduced energy consumption (AbdelSalam et al, 2009). Cloud users can also utilise their remaining 'in house' hardware more efficiently (Aymerich et al, 2008) thus freeing up internal resources.…”

“…One of the held advantages of implementing cloud computing is that it is environmentally friendly and will reduce energy consumption in IT systems, therefore leading to reduced energy servicing costs (Vining & Di Maio, 2009;AbdelSalam et al, 2009). While greener IT is a top priority for many local authorities (Foster et al, 2008) the participating councils do not think that adopting cloud computing on its own will reduce energy consumption much more than the IT practices they are already implementing.…”

Study on the Specific Methods of Energy Efficiency Assessment in Cloud Computing Environment

“…[6]Using this energy efficiency evaluation model can effectively control computer energy consumption and output in the process of cloud computing environment and provide guidance for the calculation of computer energy efficiency assessment [7].…”