GREENING OF DATA CENTERS

Abstract
Cloud services are emerging as an essential component of the enterprise IT infrastructure. The
cloud physical infrastructure comprises the data center (DC) infrastructure (i.e. computing,
storage, and general IT resources) as well as the network connectivity interconnecting DCs with
each other and users. Data centers, which are used to provide the infrastructure and resource pool
for cloud computing, consume a large amount of energy. Energy consumption trends of data
centers due to significant increase in data applications over the years have grown considerably.
Future energy consumption predictions of these data centers are even bigger concerns. To reduce
this energy consumption, and hence, carbon footprint and green house gas emission of cloud

computing, and information technology in general, energy-efficient methods of operation have to

be investigated and adopted.
Use of renewable energy resources (RES or green energy) in amalgamation with non renewable
energy resources (brown energy) can provide a promising solution in efficient utilization of
energy and environmental concerns in operation of data centers. Since green energy is volatile
and intermittent in nature. Therefore in this study we will focus on the dynamic utilization of
green and brown energy as well. In this study, we introduce the renewable-energy-aware cloud
service and virtual machine (VM) migration to relocate energy demand using dynamic and
flexible cloud-resource-allocation techniques and help overcome the challenges of renewable
energy.

CONTENTS
1. Introduction .1
1.1 Live VM Migration
i
1.2 Renewable Energy (RES) Aware Migration...
..2

2. Modeling :The System Architecture ..............3

3. References .......4

1. Introduction
Since cloud infrastructures now days are providing data intensive applications such as medical
informatics, genomics, financial, and other large datasets. Future trend is towards more number
of such data applications that are going to increase the demand for cloud infrastructures. This
increasing demand, in turn, is going to contribute in increased energy consumption and hence,
carbon footprint and green house gas emission, in servers, storage equipments and networking
infrastructures. This increase in energy consumption will be backed up by electric grids that are
powered by fossil fuel based brown energy.
Some points regarding brown energy resources:
These resources are scarce in nature.
Extraction of these resources is a highly specialized task and expensive too.

Require considerable capital investment when harnessed for electricity production.

Pose environmental threats due to emission of green house gases on combustion.

From above stated points we can say that, using brown energy for powering cloud infrastructure
in near future will burden the cloud service providers with huge capital investment and will also
pose environmental concerns.

Architecture
Fig 1 shows the system architectureFig
for1 System
this study.
Where the DCs will be backed up with
amalgamation of both green and brown energy resources with emphasis on the use of green
energy resources.
Some points regarding green energy resources:1
These resources are plentiful in nature.
These resources can be harnessed easily using solar farms, wind farms etc.
Require one time capital investment for establishing harnessing plants.
Environment friendly in nature i.e. these resources do not cause pollution when utilized.
From above mentioned points regarding green energy resources, it can be concluded that these
energy resources have the capability to make their considerable share in powering data centers
along with brown energy resources in an efficient and environment friendly manner.

Further in this introduction we will explore the methodology utilized to make a green cloud
infrastructure environment.
1.1 Live VM Migration
Basically live VM migration is used to achieve cloud bursting, geographical load balancing, IT
consolidation within a single data center, etc.
Cloud bursting is a technique where an enterprise normally employs local servers to run
applications and dynamically harness cloud servers to enhance capacity during periods of
workload stress.
In our study, we are using live VM migration technique for the following reasons:
VM migration provides the opportunity to reduce energy demand at a fossil- fuel based
brown energy site and relocate the demand at a renewable energy site.
Migration of services in this way is easier and cheaper than transmitting green energy
over the grid, which incurs significant losses.
Additionally, for service and cloud providers, migrating VMs to reduce brown energy
consumption is more pragmatic from a business perspective as providers have more
flexibility and control in migrating VMs than electricity from one location to another.
1.2 Renewable Energy (RES) Aware Migration
Under RES aware control and management of the cloud infrastructure with VM and
service migration, VMs are placed in data centers with access to RES first and when
these data centers are exhausted (i.e. no more VMs can be placed), VMs are placed in
data centers with no access to renewable energy.

2. Modeling: The System Architecture

Traditionally, such service migrations require a substantial downtime while the VM state is
copied and network reconfiguration is performed
before resuming service. Migration of a VM
22
over the WAN generates significant amount of traffic and involves complex processes of
network resource allocation, VM state transfer, VM network setting reconfiguration, etc. Here,
we describe a model that captures important aspects of a VM migration.

A VM migration over WAN is carried out by first establishing a network connection

between source and destination locations, then transferring the memory and disk
storage states and finally re-configuring the VM and resuming the activity at the
destination site.

Transfer of memory states occur in three phases. First, a full memory copy is
performed. To cater for the modified or dirtied memory during this initial full copy
period and the subsequent transfer periods, an iterative copy phase is started. In each
iteration of this phase, the dirtied memory after the last iteration is copied to the
destination. Transferred data amount at each iteration depends on the memory
modification (or dirtying rate) and the provisioned network bandwidth. Service is
always available at the source location during this phase. When a certain predefined
stop condition is met, the iterative copy phase is stopped and VM is halted for a short
duration for the final memory copy.
An important aspect of live VM migration is to keep existing client connections
to the VM alive during and after migration i.e., the migration is seamless and
does not impact clients perception

References
[1] M. Pickavet, W. Vereecken, S. Demeyer, P. Audenaert, B. Vermeulen,C. Develder, D. Colle,
B. Dhoedt, and P. Demeester, Worldwide energy needs for ICT: The rise of power-aware
3
networking, in Proc., ANTS,2008.
[2] Y. Zhang, P. Chowdhury, M. Tornatore, and B. Mukherjee, Energy efficiency in telecom
optical networks, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 441458,
July 2010.

[3]Xiaowen Dong,Taisir El-Gorashi, and Jaafar M.H. Elmirghani, Green IP Over WDM
Networks With Data Centers,Journal Of Lightwave Technology, vol.29, No. 12, June15,2011
[4] J. Baliga, R. Ayre, K. Hinton, and R. Tucker, Green cloud computing: Balancing energy in
processing, storage, and transport, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 99, no. 1, pp. 149
167,Jan2011.
[5] F. Travostino, P. Daspit, L. Gommans, C. Jog, C. de Laat, J. Mambretti,I. Monga, B. van
Oudenaarde, S. Raghunath, and P. Y. Wang, Seamlesslive migration of virtual machines over
the MAN/WAN, Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 901907, 2006