Data centers are the building blocks of IT business organizations providing the capabilities of centralized repository for storage, management, networking and dissemination of data. With the rapid increase in the capacity and size of data centers, there is a continuous increase in the demand for energy consumption. These data centers not only consume a tremendous amount of energy but are riddled with IT inefficiencies. All data center are plagued with thousands of servers as major components. These servers consume huge energy without performing useful work. In an average server environment, 30% of the servers are "dead" only consuming energy, without being properly utilized. Their utilization ratio is only 5 to 10 percent. This paper focuses on the use of an emerging technology called virtualization to achieve energy efficient data centers by providing a solution called server consolidation. It increases the utilization ratio up to 50% saving huge amount of energy. Server consolidation helps in implementing green data centers to ensure that IT infrastructure contributes as little as possible to the emission of green house gases, and helps to regain power and cooling capacity, recapture resilience and dramatically reducing energy costs and total cost of ownership.
D ata centers are the building blocks of any IT business organization, providing capabilities of centralized storage, backups, management, networking and dissemination of data in which the mechanical, lighting, electrical and computing systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact [1]. Data centers are found in nearly every sector of the economy, ranging from financial services, media, high-tech, universities, government institutions, and many others. They use and operate data centers to aid business processes, information management and communication functions [2]. Due to rapid growth in the size of the data centers there is a continuous increase in the demand for both the physical infrastructure and IT equipments, resulting in continuous increase in energy consumption.
Data center IT equipment consists of many individual devices like Storage devices, Servers, chillers, generators, cooling towers and many more. But Servers are the main consumers of energy because they are in huge number and their size continuously increases with the increase in the size of data centers.
As new servers are being added continuously into data centers without considering the proper utilization of already installed servers, it will cause an unwanted and unavoidable increase in the energy consumption, as well as increase in physical infrastructure like over-sizing of heating and cooling equipments. This increased consumption of energy causes an increase in the production of green house gases which are hazardous for environmental health. Hence it not only consumes space, energy, but also cost environmental stewardship.
Virtualization technology is now becoming an important advancement in IT especially for business organizations and has become a top to bottom overhaul of the computing industry. Virtualization combines or divides the computing resources of a server based environment to provide different operating environments using different methodologies and techniques like hardware and software partitioning or aggregation, partial or complete machine simulation, emulation and time sharing [3].
It enables running two or more operating systems simultaneously on a single machine. Virtual machine monitor (VMM) or hypervisor is a software that provides platform to host multiple operating systems running concurrently and sharing different resources among each other to provide services to the end users depending on the service levels defined before the processes [4].
Virtualization and server consolidation techniques are proposed to increase the utilization of underutilized servers so as to decrease the energy consumption by data centers and hence reducing the carbon footprints [4].
Section 2 provides a detailed background of the problem and emphasizes the need for implementing virtualization technology to save energy and cost. Section 3 describes the solution of t h e p r o b l e m a n d p r o p o s e s a m e t h o d o l o g y o f categorizing the resources of data center into different resource pools, and analysis of the results to prove the benefits of server consolidation. Section 4 describes the process of implementing virtualization technology in a data center. In the last conclusions and recommendations are given.
In recent years the commercial, organizational and political landscape has changed fundamentally for data centre operators due to a confluence of apparently incompatible demands and constraints.
The energy use and environmental impact of data centers has recently become a significant issue for both operators and policy makers. Global warming forecasts that rising temperatures, melting ice and population dislocations due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere from use of carbon-based energy. Unfortunately, data centers represent a relatively easy target due to the very high density of energy consumption and ease of measurement in comparison to other, possibly more significant areas of IT energy use. Policy makers have identified IT and specifically data centre energy use as one of the fastest rising sectors. At the same time the commodity price of energy has risen faster than many expectations. This rapid rise in energy cost has substantially impacted the business models for many data centers. Energy security and availability is also becoming an issue for data centre operators as the combined pressures of fossil fuel availability, generation and distribution infrastructure capacity and environmental energy policy make prediction of energy availability and cost difficult [5].
As corporations look to become more energy efficient, they are examining their operations more closely. Data centers are found a major culprit in consuming a lot of energy in their overall operations. In order to handle the sheer magnitude of today’s data, data centers have grown themselves significantly by continuous addition of thousands of servers. These servers are consuming much m
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