On energy consumption of switch-centric data center networks

Olusogo Popoola,Bernardi Pranggono

doi:10.1007/s11227-017-2132-5

Abstract

Data center network (DCN) is the core of cloud computing and accounts for 40% energy spend when compared to cooling system, power distribution and conversion of the whole data center (DC) facility. It is essential to reduce the energy consumption of DCN to ensure energy-efficient (green) data center can be achieved. An analysis of DC performance and efficiency emphasizing the effect of bandwidth provisioning and throughput on energy proportionality of two most common switch-centric DCN topologies: three-tier (3T) and fat tree (FT) based on the amount of actual energy that is turned into computing power are presented. Energy consumption of switch-centric DCNs by realistic simulations is analyzed using GreenCloud simulator. Power-related metrics were derived and adapted for the information technology equipment processes within the DCN. These metrics are acknowledged as subset of the major metrics of power usage effectiveness and data center infrastructure efficiency, known to DCs. This study suggests that although in overall FT consumes more energy, it spends less energy for transmission of a single bit of information, outperforming 3T.

Highlights

The need for secure and efficient hosting of digital information demonstrated in converged networks led to the rapid evolution of data center (DC) around the world
The capital expenditure (CAPEX) at the initial setup of a DC is enormous but sometimes incomparable to the operational expenditure (OPEX) [5]. The latter is needed to maintain the quality of service (QoS) in the service level agreement (SLA) and for users to have a good quality of experience (QoE)
We present our evaluation results and compare the performance and power-related metrics [10], bandwidth oversubscription ratio (BOR), communication network energy efficiency (CNEE) and network power usage effectiveness (NPUE) of the two Data center network (DCN) architectures

Summary

Introduction

The need for secure and efficient hosting of digital information demonstrated in converged networks (data, voice, image and video) led to the rapid evolution of data center (DC) around the world. 5 10 20 implemented the traditional 3T topology at the core of their network This has resulted in enormous energy consumption and budget increase along with the exponential growth of DCs. This has resulted in enormous energy consumption and budget increase along with the exponential growth of DCs This is further illustrated, where the past, present and future projections of operations, bandwidth demands and power utilization for highperformance systems are shown [13]. A typical 3T DCN architecture is a hierarchy of three layers of switches (core, aggregation and access/edge) arranged in a tree-based topology with two of its upper layers connected with enterprise network devices (see Fig. 1). Server typically operates at 66% of full-load energy consumption when the DC is idle, making dynamic power management (DPM) and dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) approaches selective [11,15,16,17]

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Conclusion