Autonomous Network and IT Resource Management for Geographically Distributed Data Centers

Abstract

As enterprises struggle to meet the demand for elastic cloud computing services in distributed data centers (DCs), a significant portion of the total expenditure is spent on the procurement and maintenance of server and network equipment. Network and server resource utilization efficiency is therefore crucial to minimize overall costs and increase return on investment. We present an adaptive and synergistic management of both network and IT resources with an autonomous control plane on a converged inter/ intra-DC network to address this issue. The control plane uses its awareness of both network and IT resource usage to provide dynamic resource allocations to meet quality of service guarantees, while also allowing for reduction in operational expenses by consolidating virtual machines to maintain high CPU usage on the active servers. We built a three-node inter-DC experimental testbed to demonstrate the feasibility of our concept and show that our algorithm successfully provisions both network resources and consolidates IT resources under various load conditions.