Sourcing Strategies for Energy-Efficient Virtual Organisations in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Energy efficiency is an important managerial variable in service business models. Cloud computing advocates the innovation and design of open software services. How the supply of energy-aware software services affects the outsourcing strategies of IT businesses, however, is still not known. This research is concerned with the formation of green virtual organisations (GVOs). Such GVOs foster novel business models to enable the commercialisation of "green" software services. We approach the formation problem from a game-theoretic perspective, which provides well suited models for analysing sourcing strategies of service customers. For analysing the formation, we particularly study the social welfare by examining the economic and ecological efficiency of the GVO as a whole. The contribution of our research is an agent-based GVO formation mechanism that optimises the social welfare of service providers and customers. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed artifact in a set of simulation experiments.

Multi-Objective Binary Whale Optimization-Based Virtual Machine Allocation in Cloud Environments

“…Figure 1 demonstrates the allocation of VMs in which all the VMs are allotted randomly to the server, while after optimization in figure 2, the VMs are consolidated in the first three servers, and the rest of the unutilized servers are turned off, thus saving the resources and energy. Identifying optimal VMs allocation belongs to the NP-complete problem (Lo, V. M. 1983), and achieving the optimum resolution of this is typically computationally infeasible, when the cloud involves multiple hosts and users (Widmer, T., Premm, M., & Karaenke, P. 2013). The issue can be addressed to minimize resource wastage and the number of active servers in the cloud data center.…”