Energy-Saving in Optical Data Center Networks

Abstract

In recent years, with the rapid expansion of network scale and types of applications, cloud computing and virtualization technology have been widely used in the data centers, providing a fast, flexible and convenient service. However, energy efficiency has increased dramatically. The problem of energy consumption has been widespread concern around the world. In this paper, we study the energy-saving in optical data center networks. First, we summarize the traditional methods of energy-saving and meanwhile reveal that the predominant energy consuming resources are the servers installed in the data centers. Then we present the server virtualization technologies based on Virtual Machines (VMs) that have been used widely to reduce energy consumption of servers. Results show server consolidation based on VM migration can efficiently reduce the overall energy consumption compared with traditional energy-saving approaches by reducing energy consumption of the entire network infrastructure in data center networks. For future work, we will study server consolidation based on VM migration in actual environment and address QoS requirements and access latency.