Integration of a Power/Workload Control System into IT management architecture

Abstract

Virtualized environments today allow managing and migrating workloads more flexibly such that goals of minimizing power usage in data centers can be pursued. Automated closed-loop controllers are often used for exercising control over workload placement and migration in a data center. The combination with power, airflow and temperature control can even more contribute to energy efficiency in a data center crossing the traditionally separated domains of IT management and facility management. These Power/Workload Control Systems (PWCS) are actively managing IT systems and their behaviors - changes that have impact on other IT management systems in the data center. Consequently, PWCS should be carefully integrated into an overall data center IT management architecture such that changes affected by the PWCS are properly propagated to other IT management systems and vice versa, definitions for the PWCS (e.g. about their control domain and their control policies) are obtained from centrally managed repositories such as CMDB. The reality, however, is that autonomous control systems are constructed and operated in isolation from other IT management systems in a data center. This paper describes how an autonomous PWCS can be integrated into an IT management architecture and can be connected with other management systems that are used in a data center.