Utilization analysis of servers in a data centre

Abstract

A data centre is a large centralized collection of IT infrastructure (servers, databases, application software etc.) for business functions. Analysis of the servers in a data centre with respect to their utilization characteristics is important for effective management the IT infrastructure - e.g., for reducing costs, improving reliability of business operations and capacity planning. Already saturated servers can crash with even a slight increase in workload and better usage of underutilized servers can save money and power. In this paper, we formalize several business questions related to utilization of servers in a data centre: already saturated, near saturation, under-utilized and interesting utilization patterns. We provide algorithms that use rigorous statistical techniques to automatically identify servers that satisfy such conditions. We present the results of utilization analysis of a real data centre. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.