A Server Consolidation Solution

Advances in server architecture has enabled corporations the ability to strategically redesign their data centers in order to realign the system infrastructure to business needs. The architectural design of physically and logically consolidating servers into fewer and smaller hardware platforms can reduce data center overhead costs, while adding quality of service. In order for the organization to take advantage of the architectural opportunity a server consolidation project was proposed that utilized blade technology coupled with the virtualization of servers. Physical consolidation reduced the data center facility requirements, while server virtualization reduced the number of required hardware platforms. With the constant threat of outsourcing, coupled with the explosive growth of the organization, the IT managers were challenged to provide increased system services and functionality to a larger user community, while maintaining the same head count. A means of reducing overhead costs associated with the in-house data center was to reduce the required facility and hardware resources. The reduction in the data center footprint required less real estate, electricity, fire suppression infrastructure, and HVAC utilities. In addition, since the numerous stand alone servers were consolidated onto a standard platform system administration became more agile to business opportunities.

Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges

The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi, Indi

Optimising for energy or robustness? Trade-offs for VM consolidation in virtualized datacenters under uncertainty

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11590-016-1065-xReducing the energy consumption of virtualized datacenters and the Cloud is very important in order to lower CO2 footprint and operational cost of a Cloud operator. However, there is a trade-off between energy consumption and perceived application performance. In order to save energy, Cloud operators want to consolidate as many Virtual Machines (VM) on the fewest possible physical servers, possibly involving overbooking of resources. However, that may involve SLA violations when many VMs run on peak load. Such consolidation is typically done using VM migration techniques, which stress the network. As a consequence, it is important to find the right balance between the energy consumption and the number of migrations to perform. Unfortunately, the resources that a VM requires are not precisely known in advance, which makes it very difficult to optimise the VM migration schedule. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel approach based on the theory of robust optimisation. We model the VM consolidation problem as a robust Mixed Integer Linear Program and allow to specify bounds for e.g. resource requirements of the VMs. We show that, by using our model, Cloud operators can effectively trade-off uncertainty of resource requirements with total energy consumption. Also, our model allows us to quantify the price of the robustness in terms of energy saving against resource requirement violations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security: A Solutions View

For cloud users and providers alike, security is an everyday concern, yet there are very few books covering cloud security as a main subject. This book will help address this information gap from an Information Technology solution and usage-centric view of cloud infrastructure security. The book highlights the fundamental technology components necessary to build and enable trusted clouds. Here also is an explanation of the security and compliance challenges organizations face as they migrate mission-critical applications to the cloud, and how trusted clouds, that have their integrity rooted in hardware, can address these challenges. This book provides: Use cases and solution reference architectures to enable infrastructure integrity and the creation of trusted pools leveraging Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Trusted geo-location management in the cloud, enabling workload and data location compliance and boundary control usages in the cloud. OpenStack-based reference architecture of tenant-controlled virtual machine and workload protection in the cloud. A reference design to enable secure hybrid clouds for a cloud bursting use case, providing infrastructure visibility and control to organizations

Enterprise 2.0 – Is The Market Ready?

Enterprise 2.0 family technologies have growing popularity, the cloud computing market is growing rapidly and, as a consequence, companies of all sizes start to evaluate the potential fit. The use of “Software as a Service”, “Platform as a Service” and “Infrastructure as a Service” has been evolving during the past years and has become increasingly popular. As its computing viability and benefits are legitimized, the adoption rate is rapidly increasing. The most popular business model in the abovementioned family is by far “Software as a Service” (also called SaaS), which is a software distribution model assuming the software applications are hosted and maintained by the vendor or the distributor, and user access is granted exclusively by means of the Internet. Based on both literature review and action research, the paper at hand is a synthesis for the results of an empirical study performed during the last two years among Romanian and foreign companies, in order to outline and provide an objective and unbiased answer to the question: “Is the market ready for these technologies or did they come too soon?”. The paper is a part of a larger research performed by the author in the field of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.Enterprise 2.0, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Empirical study