Digital Twin of a Cloud Data Centre: An OpenStack Cluster Visualisation

Abstract

AbstractData centres in contemporary times are essential as the supply of data increases. Data centres are areas where computing systems are concentrated for facilitating data processing, transfer and storage. At present, traditional data centres have moved more towards the cloud model—thereby making the processing, storage and harnessing of data more manageable and more accessible via the utility and subscription-based model of computing services. From the administrative point of view, cloud data centres are complex systems and hard to grasp and require large amounts of time to analyse different aspects of the cloud data centre such as maintenance and resource management. For a cloud data centre admin, this could be a challenging problem and a highly time-consuming task. Accordingly, there is a need to improve the useability of cloud data centre monitoring and management tools, and the digital twin could fulfil this need. This book chapter’s primary objective is to construct a digital twin—a 3D visualisation and monitoring tool—of a cloud data centre managed by OpenStack, the well-known open-source cloud computing infrastructure software. To evaluate our proposed tool, we garner feedback on the digital twin’s useability compared to the OpenStack dashboard. The input will be received from cloud data centre experts as they test the digital twin and answer various questions in an interview. The study results show that our proposed digital twin will help data centre admins better monitor and manage their data centres. It will also facilitate further research and implementation of the digital twin of data centres to improve usability.KeywordsCloud data centreDigital twinOpenStackVisualisationMonitoringResource management