Internal Data Center Research Articles

Using Planning Data to Monitor the Health of Communities - The Healthy Development: Monitoring and Mapping Project

IntroductionThe impact of the built environment on health and chronic disease outcomes is increasingly being recognized. As Public Health develops interventions to transform the health-promoting potential of built environments, effective monitoring and evaluation will require the creation and baseline measurement of key health-promoting urban elements.
 Objectives and ApproachThe Healthy Development Monitoring Project aims to assess health-promoting aspects of the existing built environment across the Region of Peel, a large region of 1.382 million people in Southern Ontario comprised of three local municipalities (the Cities of Mississauga, Brampton and Town of Caledon).
 Project objectives include:
 
 Produce evidence-informed indicators to measure health-promoting built form elements at a neighbourhood-scale across the region
 Produce a GIS-based visualization that incorporates these indicators into a single model to measure their combined impact on the built form
 Reproduce these indicators over time to monitor for changes in Peel’s built form
 
 ResultsThe resulting Healthy Development Monitoring Map (HDMM) is an interactive online mapping tool that includes twenty built form indicators characterizing the region’s built environment, including: density, service proximity, land use mix, street connectivity, streetscape characteristics and efficient parking. These indicators were created through extensive cross-sectoral collaboration with regional and municipal staff in land-use and policy planning, transportation, internal data centers and academic institutions. This collaborative approach enabled the linking of data sets from land-use planning, urban design and transportation to allow the health-promoting potential of existing built environment conditions to be objectively described. The HDMM demonstrates considerable progress in producing precise, neighbourhood-level built environment indicators at a regional scale by integrating census and local data into a comprehensive set of empirically-derived measures.
 Conclusion/ImplicationsThe HDMM is a novel approach to quantifying a social determinant of health through collaborative data acquisition and analysis. The HDMM benefits public health, planning and non-governmental decision-makers by creating a holistic presentation of key infrastructure and design elements that contribute to healthier urban environments.

An Efficient Survivable Design With Bandwidth Guarantees for Multi-Tenant Cloud Networks

In cloud data centers (DCs), where hosted applications share the underlying network resources, network bandwidth guarantees have shown to improve predictability of application performance and cost. However, recent empirical studies have also shown that often DC devices and links are not all that reliable and that failures may cause service outages, rendering significant revenue loss for the affected tenants, as well as the cloud operator. Accordingly, cloud operators are pressed to offer both reliable and predictable performance for the hosted applications. While much work has been done on solving both problems separately, this paper seeks to develop a joint framework by which cloud operators can offer both performance and availability guarantees for the hosted tenants. In particular, this paper considers a simple model to abstract the bandwidth guarantees requirement for the tenant and presents a protection plan design which consists of backup virtual machines (VMs) placement and bandwidth provisioning to optimize the internal DC traffic. We show through solid motivational examples that finding the optimal protection plan design is highly perplexing, and encompasses several constituent challenges. Owing to its complexity, we decompose it into two subproblems, and solve them separately. First, we invoke a placement subproblem of the minimum number of backup VMs and then we explore the most efficient correspondence between backup and primary VMs (i.e., protection plan) which minimizes the bandwidth redundancy. Further, we study the design of various facets of such a plan by exploiting bandwidth sharing opportunities in multi-tenant cloud networks.

DaaS: A Cost‐Savings Strategy

Firms are looking to various IT strategies in the wake of the vendors providing services through cloud offerings. One of the newest is Desktop‐as‐a‐Service (DaaS). DaaS is providing end users with a desktop environment either through an internal data center or through a cloud provider. In either case, firms can eliminate many costs associated with maintaining separate desktops for its employees and consultants. The firm can also easily scale up and back with minimum investment while using DaaS. Thus, this article attempts to explain DaaS while explaining how firms will be able to achieve cost savings and operational efficiency by using DaaS. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A call for energy efficiency in data centers

In this paper, we explore a data center's performance with a call for energy efficiency through green computing. Some performance metrics we examine in data centers are server energy usage, Power Usage Effectiveness and utilization rate, i.e., the extent to which data center servers are being used. Recent literature indicates that utilization rates at many internal data centers are quite low, resulting in poor usage of resources such as energy and materials. Based on our study, we attribute these low utilization rates to not fully taking advantage of virtualization, and not retiring phantom (unused) servers. This paper describes our initiative corroborated with real data in a university setting. We suggest that future data centers will need to increase their utilization rates for better energy efficiency, and moving towards a cloud provider would help. However, we argue that neither a pure in-house data center or cloud model is the best solution. Instead we recommend, from a decision support perspective, a hybrid model in data center management to lower costs and increase services, while also providing greater energy efficiency.

The Inter-Datacenter Connection in SDN and Traditional Hybrid Network

With the extensive application and continuous growth of big data, new challenges are imposed into network design. Without enough consideration of big data in traditional design, bottleneck problems will occur frequently in such IT infrastructure. SDN (Software Defined Network) is one of the solutions to conquer such problems. However, most current SDN applications are limited to pure SDN structure or internal data centers. Differently, we focus on the traffic transmission between data centers in this paper. We construct the WAN links between data centers through VPN based on SDN architecture and traditional network. Both theoretical analysis and experiment results show that SDN had advantage over traditional network. Our work also suggested SDN architecture and traditional network could coexist in the real condition.