Energy Aware Network Operations

Abstract

Abstract-Networking devices today consume a non-trivial amount of energy and it has been shown that this energy consumption is largely independent of the load through the devices. With a strong need to curtail the rising operational costs of IT infrastructure, there is a tremendous opportunity for introducing energy awareness in the design and operation of enterprise and data center networks. We focus on these networks as they are under the control of a single administrative domain in which network-wide control can be consistently applied. In this paper, we describe and analyze three approaches to saving energy in single administrative domain networks, without significantly impacting the networks' ability to provide the expected levels of performance and availability. We also explore the tradeoffs between conserving energy and meeting performance and availability requirements. We conduct an extensive case study of our algorithms by simulating a real Web 2.0 workload in a real data center network topology using power characterizations that we obtain from real network hardware. Our results indicate that for our workload and data center scenario, 16% power savings (with no performance penalty and small decrease in availability) can be obtained merely by appropriately adjusting the active network elements (links). Significant additional savings (up to 75%) can be obtained by incorporating network traffic management and server workload consolidation.

Simulation and Performance Analysis of Data Intensive and Workload Intensive Cloud Computing Data Centers

“…However, such data centers, depending on the type of switches used and per-host bandwidth requirements, could typically support not more than 5,000 hosts. Given the pool of servers in today's data centers that are of the order of 100,000 hosts [11] and the requirement to keep layer-2 switches in the access network, a three-tiered design becomes the most appropriate option.…”

“…This way the workload interdependencies are modeled. In fact, internal communication in the data center can account for as much as 70% of total data transmitted [11]. …”

“…A number of studies demonstrate that often a simple optimization of the data center architecture and energy-aware scheduling of the workloads may lead to significant energy savings. Reference [11] demonstrates energy savings of up to 75% that can be achieved by traffic management and workload consolidation techniques.…”

DENS: data center energy-efficient network-aware scheduling

“…However, such data centers, depending on the type of switches used and per-host bandwidth requirements, could typically support not more than 5,000 hosts. Given the pool of servers in today's data centers that are of the order of 100,000 hosts [13] and the requirement to keep layer-2 switches in the access network, a three-tiered design becomes the most appropriate option. Although 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) transceivers are commercially available, in a three-tiered architecture the computing servers (grouped in racks) are interconnected using 1 GE links.…”

Smart Monitoring Embedded Service for Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Management in Data Centers

“…The proposals can be classified into two large groups: solutions based on hardware and those based on software [1]. The goals of the former are to improve the efficiencies of hardware components, both of network devices and physical servers [2][3][4]. The latter focus on aspects such as the operating system, the virtual machines or software applications [5][6][7].…”