Green Resource Management in Distributed Cloud Infrastructures

Computing has evolved over time according to different paradigms, along with an increasing need for computational power. Modern computing paradigms basically share the same underlying concept of Utility Computing, that is a service provisioning model through which a shared pool of computing resources is used by a customer when needed. The objective of Utility Computing is to maximize the resource utilization and bring down the relative costs. Nearly a decade ago, the concept of Cloud Computing emerged as a virtualization technique where services were executed remotely in a ubiquitous way, providing scalable and virtualized resources. The spread of Cloud Computing has been also encouraged by the success of the virtualization, which is one of the most promising and efficient techniques to consolidate system's utilization on one side, and to lower power, electricity charges and space costs in data centers on the other. In the last few years, there has been a remarkable growth in the number of data centers, which represent one of the leading sources of increased business data traffic on the Internet. An effect of the growing scale and the wide use of data centers is the dramatic increase of power consumption, with significant consequences both in terms of environmental and operational costs. In addition to power consumption, also carbon footprint of the Cloud infrastructures is becoming a serious concern, since a lot of power is generated from non-renewable sources. Hence, energy awareness has become one of the major design constraints for Cloud infrastructures. In order to face these challenges, a new generation of energy-efficient and eco-sustainable network infrastructures is needed. In this thesis, a novel energy-aware resource orchestration framework for distributed Cloud infrastructures is discussed. The aim is to explain how both network and IT resources can be managed while, at the same time, the overall power consumption and carbon footprint are being minimized. To this end, an energy-aware routing algorithm and an extension of the OSPF-TE protocol to distribute energy-related information have been implemented

Network security for hybrid cloud

Cloud computing has enabled elastic and transparent access to distributed services, without investing in new infrastructures. In the last few years, Cloud computing has grown from being a promising business concept to one of the fast growing segments of the IT industry. Despite of all the hype surrounding the Cloud, enterprise customers are still reluctant to deploy their business in the Cloud. Security is one of the major issues which reduces the growth of Cloud computing and complications with data privacy and data protection continue to plague the market. In this paper, we propose a solution for Hybrid Cloud security, focusing on a Virtual Intrusion Detection System (V-IDS). We present a new architecture that considers the basic principles of the Cloud computing, virtualization and GMPLS Control Plane and applies them to the intrusion detection systems, in order to protect Cloud networks characterized by constantly changing of the underlying infrastructure and physical topology. Based on the defined architecture, we have implemented a prototype of Cloud based IDS that validates our thesis. The prototype is realized though the integration of two open-source technologies: OpenStack and DRAGON (Dynamic Resource Allocation via GMPLS Optical Networks)

A PCE-based Architecture for the Management of Virtualized Infrastructures

The emerging Network Function Virtualization paradigm (NFV) is a disruptive change that creates new business opportunities for vendors and carriers. By exploiting virtualization technologies, it allows the dynamic creation of logically isolated infrastructures over abstracted physical networks. To be able to offer Virtualized Services efficiently, service providers need a new class of Management systems able to manage and orchestrate both network and IT virtualized resources. In this paper, we propose an enhanced network Control Plane, based on the standard Path Computation Element (PCE) architecture, which is able to jointly make network routing and IT server provisioning decisions and that can be used in an NFV environment

A PCE-based architecture for green management of virtual infrastructures

Recent evolutions of virtualization technologies allow carriers to optimize and monetize their network infrastructures in new ways, acting as virtual infrastructure providers. By assuming an underlying GMPLS-enabled network infrastructure connecting a number of geographically dispersed data centers, in this paper we define an architectural framework that allows infrastructure providers to optimally use their resources to provide Virtual Infrastructures on demand. The architecture we propose is designed as an extension of the standard Path Computation Element (PCE) architecture. A centralized entity, named VRO, is responsible for optimally allocating the physical resources needed to deploy a requested Virtual Infrastructure. In the paper, we also present how it is possible to apply our framework to pursue green management objectives so that OPEX expenditures can be reduced, while preserving contractual SLAs. We also describe a prototype of our framework that is able to configure GMPLS-enabled network nodes and Cloud-enabled data centers in order to create Virtual Infrastructures

Combining IT and network orchestration for green clouds

Energy efficiency has become one of the major design constraints for current and future cloud infrastructures. One way to conserve energy is to transition idle clusters, network elements and servers into low-powerstates. Therefore, Virtual Machine placement and dynamic re-configuration algorithms have beenrecently proposed for increasing the energy efficiency of virtualized infrastructures. However, these algorithms usually do not consider the amount of energy consumed by the network infrastructure. In this paper, we present a novel energy-aware resource orchestration framework for distributed cloud infrastructures that manages both Network and IT resources with the goal of minimizing the overall power consumption. We also present the algorithms to be executed in a distributed PCE-compliant system to control VM placement in our environment