Scalability of Networks and Services

Abstract

The continuously increasing cost of managing IT systems has led many companies to outsource their commercial services to external hosting centers. Cloud computing has emerged as one of the enabling technologies that allow such external hosting efficiently. Like any IT environment, a Cloud Computing environment requires high level of maintenance to be able to provide services to its customers. Replacing defective items (hardware/software), applying security patches, or upgrading firmware are just a few examples of the typical maintenance procedures needed in such environments. While taking resources down for maintenance, applying efficient change management techniques is a key factor to the success of the cloud. As energy has become a precious resource, research has been conducted towards devising protocols that minimize energy consumption in IT systems. In this paper, we propose a pro-active energy efficient technique for change management in cloud computing environments. We formulate the management problem into an optimization problem that aims at minimizing the total energy consumption of the cloud. Our proposed approach is pro-active in the sense that it takes prior SLA (Service Level Agreement) requests into account while determining time slots in which changes should take place. © 2009 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.