Honeyguide: A VM migration-aware network topology for saving energy consumption in data center networks

Abstract

Current network elements consume 10-20% of the total power in data centers. Today's network elements are not energyproportional and consume a constant amount of energy* regardless of the amount of traffic. Thus, turning off unused network switches is the most efficient way of reducing the energy consumption of data center networks. This paper presents Honeyguide, an energy optimizer for data center networks that not only turns off inactive switches but also increases the number of inactive switches for better energy-efficiency. To this end, Honeyguide combines two techniques: 1) virtual machine (VM) and traffic consolidation, and 2) a slight extension to the existing tree-based topologies. Honeyguide has the following advantages. The VM consolidation, which is gracefully combined with traffic consolidation, can handle severe requirements on fault tolerance. It can be introduced into existing data centers without replacing the already-deployed tree-based topologies. Our simulation results demonstrate that Honeyguide can reduce the energy consumption of network elements better than the conventional VM migration schemes, and the savings are up to 7.8% in a fat tree with k = 12. Copyright © 2013 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.