Exploring Wireless Data Center Networks: Can They Reduce Energy Consumption While Providing Secure Connections?

Data centers have become the digital backbone of the modern world. To support the growing demands on bandwidth, Data Centers consume an increasing amount of power. A significant portion of that power is consumed by information technology (IT) equipment, including servers and networking components. Additionally, the complex cabling in traditional data centers poses design and maintenance challenges and increases the energy cost of the cooling infrastructure by obstructing the flow of chilled air. Hence, to reduce the power consumption of the data centers, we proposed a wireless server-to-server data center network architecture using millimeter-wave links to eliminate the need for power-hungry switching fabric of traditional fat-tree-based data center networks. The server-to-server wireless data center network (S2S-WiDCN) architecture requires Line-of-Sight (LoS) between servers to establish direct communication links. However, in the presence of interference from internal or external sources, or an obstruction, such as an IT technician, the LoS may be blocked. To address this issue, we also propose a novel obstruction-aware adaptive routing algorithm for S2S-WiDCN. S2S-WiDCN can reduce the power consumption of the data center network portion while not affecting the power consumption of the servers in the data center, which contributes significantly towards the total power consumption of the data center. Moreover, servers in data centers are almost always underutilized due to over-provisioning, which contributes heavily toward the high-power consumption of the data centers. To address the high power consumption of the servers, we proposed a network-aware bandwidth-constrained server consolidation algorithm called Network-Aware Server Consolidation (NASCon) for wireless data centers that can reduce the power consumption up to 37% while improving the network performance. However, due to the arrival of new tasks and the completion of existing tasks, the consolidated utilization profile of servers change, which may have an adverse effect on overall power consumption over time. To overcome this, NASCon algorithm needs to be executed periodically. We have proposed a mathematical model to estimate the optimal inter-consolidation time, which can be used by the data center resource management unit for scheduling NASCon consolidation operation in real-time and leverage the benefits of server consolidation. However, in any data center environment ensuring security is one of the highest design priorities. Hence, for S2S-WiDCN to become a practical and viable solution for data center network design, the security of the network has to be ensured. S2S-WiDCN data center can be vulnerable to a variety of different attacks as it uses wireless links over an unguided channel for communication. As being a wireless system, the network has to be secured against common threats associated with any wireless networks such as eavesdropping attack, denial of services attack, and jamming attack. In parallel, other security threats such as the attack on the control plane, side-channel attack through traffic analysis are also possible. We have done an extensive study to elaborate the scope of these attacks as well as explore probable solutions against these issues. We also proposed viable solutions for the attack against eavesdropping, denial of services, jamming, and control-plane attack. To address the traffic analysis attack, we proposed a simulated annealing-based random routing mechanism which can be adopted instead of default routing in the wireless data center

AN EVALUATION OF LEGACY 3-TIER DATACENTER NETWORKS FOR ENTERPRISE COMPUTING USING MATHEMATICAL INDUCTION ALGORITHM

In today’s internet computing, regardless of the scale of infrastructural integrations, the design Cost, QoS, powermanagement etc, largely plays a role in the choice of design. In this paper, we present the limitations of traditional DataCenter Networks (DCN) for efficient web application integration in enterprise organisations. We carried out an in-depthstudy on typical enterprise DCNs viz: University of Nigeria DCN and Swift Network DCN Lagos state, seeking to ascertainthe limitations of the traditional DCN with respect to throughput, latency, scalability, efficiency in web applicationintegration, etc in QoS context. Microtic Server and Ethereal Wireshack were employed for traffic trend observation andpacket captures on a monitoring Dell Inspiron laptop connected to the UNN DCN. The traffic graphs were captured,computed and analysed. From the results obtained, deductions were derived while articulating on the limitations of thesenetworks. Using mathematical induction theorem, we show that for any introduced network enhancer, this will enable sucha network to scale optimally. In this regard, this work opines that for large scale enterprise computing, collapsing a three tiernetwork models into a low cost two-tier model using virtualization and consolidation will be widely celebrated. These formsthe basis for our future work on a re-engineered DCN for enterprise web application integrations.Keywords: Internet, Computing, Efficiency, Application, Ethereal, Wireshack, Enterpris

Wireless 60 GHz Rack to Rack Communication in a Data Center Environment

Data centers play an increasingly important role in processing the large amount of information generated in today\u27s society. An enormous amount of growth in the computational demands of data center applications has stimulated the creation of warehouse scale data centers, holding servers that number in the thousands. As the number of servers within a data center grows, the interconnecting infrastructure becomes of paramount importance. Present day interconnects are formed using either copper wire in a twisted pair configuration or through the use of fiber optic cables. One of the main concerns with the scalability of a data center\u27s interconnecting network is the power consumption. Large power hungry switches at the aggregation and core levels make up a significant portion of a data centers power portfolio and cannot be overlooked. Furthermore, large bundles of wires both reduce the air flow within data centers and are costly to replace and maintain. This cabling complexity problem limits cooling effectiveness and exacerbates the power consumption challenges. Recent advancements in the unlicensed 60 GHz spectrum have given rise to transceivers that can support high bandwidth links, comparable to wired links found in most data centers. These wireless links also exhibit promising characteristics such as spatial reusability which make them suitable within a data center environment. By taking advantage of emerging 60 GHz wireless technologies, data centers can utilize these high speed wireless links to satisfy bandwidth demands while simultaneously reducing their power consumption and cabling requirements. This thesis evaluates the benefits in terms of energy-efficiency of using 60 GHz wireless links to replace wire line links within a data center by modeling a completely wireless data center. The physical layer design and associated MAC layer will be investigated to support this wireless centric design. The proposed wireless architecture will be compared against traditional hierarchical data center architectures and evaluated based upon several performance metrics such as throughput, latency, and overall energy efficiency

Cloud Computing

In the recent years, Cloud Computing has become very popular and an interesting subject in the field of science and technology. The research efforts in the Cloud Computing have led to a number of applications used for the convenience in daily life. Cloud Computing is not only providing solutions at the enterprise level but it is also suitable in organizing a centralized database which is accessible from every corner of the world. It is said that, 10 to 15 years later when all the enterprises have adopted the Cloud Computing, there will be no more perception for the data center in the company. The aim of this Master’s thesis “Cloud Computing: Server Configuration and Software Implementation for the Data Collection with Wireless Sensor Nodes” was to integrate the Wireless Sensor Network with Cloud Computing in a such a way that the data received from the Sensor node can be access able from anywhere in the world. To accomplish this task, a Wireless Sensor Network was deployed to measure the environmental conditions such as Temperature, Light and the Sensor’s battery information and the measured values are sent to a web server from where the data can be accessed. The project also includes the software implementation to collect the sensor’s measurements and a Graphical User Interface (GUI) application which reads the values from the sensor network and stores it to the database.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Modelling Energy Consumption based on Resource Utilization

Power management is an expensive and important issue for large computational infrastructures such as datacenters, large clusters, and computational grids. However, measuring energy consumption of scalable systems may be impractical due to both cost and complexity for deploying power metering devices on a large number of machines. In this paper, we propose the use of information about resource utilization (e.g. processor, memory, disk operations, and network traffic) as proxies for estimating power consumption. We employ machine learning techniques to estimate power consumption using such information which are provided by common operating systems. Experiments with linear regression, regression tree, and multilayer perceptron on data from different hardware resulted into a model with 99.94\% of accuracy and 6.32 watts of error in the best case.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Supercomputing on 14th June, 201