CLOUD COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY

Cloud computing is offering utility oriented IT services to users world wide. It enables hosting of applications from consumer, scientific and business domains. However data centers hosting cloud computing applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. With energy shortages and global climate change leading our concerns these days, the power consumption of data centers has become a key issue. Therefore, we need green cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy, but also reduce operational costs. The vision for energy efficient management of cloud computing environments is presented here. A green scheduling algorithm which works by powering down servers when they are not in use is also presented.

Introduction

In 1969, Leonard Klein rock, one of the chief scientists of the original Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which seeded the Internet, said: “As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow up and become sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of „computer utilities‟ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country.” This vision of computing utilities based on a service provisioning model anticipated the massive transformation of the entire computing industry in the 21st century whereby computing services will be readily available on demand, like other utility services available in today’s society. Similarly, users (consumers) need to pay providers only when they access the computing services. In addition, consumers no longer need to invest heavily or encounter difficulties in building and maintaining complex IT infrastructure.

In such a model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where the services are hosted. This model has been referred to as utility computing, or recently as Cloud computing. The latter term denotes the infrastructure as a “Cloud” from which businesses and users can access applications as services from anywhere in the world on demand. Hence, Cloud computing can be classified as a new paradigm for the dynamic provisioning of computing services supported by state-of-the-art data centers that usually employ Virtual Machine (VM) technologies for consolidation and environment isolation purposes . Many computing service providers including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and IBM are rapidly deploying data centers in various locations around the world to deliver Cloud computing services.

                           

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing delivers infrastructure, platform, and software (applications) as services, which are made available to consumers as subscription-based services under the pay-as-you-go model. In industry these services are referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) respectively. A recent Berkeley report stated “Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service”.

Clouds aim to drive the design of the next generation data centers by architecting them as networks of virtual services (hardware, database, user-interface, application logic) so that users can access and deploy applications from anywhere in the world on demand at competitive costs depending on their QoS (Quality of Service) requirements .

Conclusion

Applying green technologies is highly essential for the sustainable development of cloud computing. Of the various green methodologies enquired, the DVFS technology is a highly hardware oriented approach and hence less flexible. The result of various VM migration simulations show that MM policy leads to the best energy savings: by 83%, 66% and 23% less energy consumption relatively to NPA, DVFS and ST policies respectively with thresholds 30-70% and ensuring percentage of SLA violations of 1.1%; and by 87%, 74% and 43% with thresholds 50-90% and 6.7% of SLA violations. MM policy leads to more than 10 times less VM migrations than ST policy. The results show flexibility of the algorithm, as the thresholds can be adjusted according to SLA requirements. Strict SLA (1.11%) allows the achievement of the energy consumption of 1.48 KWh. However, if SLA are relaxed (6.69%), the energy consumption is further reduced to 1.14 KWh.  Single threshold policies can save power upto 20%, but they also cause a large number of SLA violations. Green scheduling algorithms based on neural predictors can lead to a 70% power savings. These policies also enable us to cut down data centre energy costs, thus leading to a strong, competitive cloud computing industry. End users will also benefit from the decreased energy bills.