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Abstract: Data centers are the building blocks of IT business enterprises providing the capabilities of centralized repository for
storage, management, networking and dissemination of data. With the rapid increase in the capacity and size of data centers, there
is a continuous increase in the demand for energy consumption. These data centers not only consume a tremendous amount of
energy but are riddled with IT inefficiencies. Data center are plagued with thousands of servers as major components. These
servers consume huge energy without performing useful work. In an average server environment, 30% of the servers are “dead”
only consuming energy, without being properly utilized. This paper proposes a five step model using an emerging technology called
virtualization to achieve energy efficient data centers. This process helps to make data centers green and energy efficient so as to
ensure that IT infrastructure contributes as little as possible to the emission of green house gases, and helps to regain power and
cooling capacity, recapture resilience and dramatically reducing energy costs and total cost of ownership.
Keywords: Data center, Carbon Footprints, Green Technology, Live Migration & Virtualization.
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1. INTRODUCTION
Data center IT equipment consists of many individual
devices like Storage devices, Servers, chillers, generators,
D ata centers are the building blocks of any IT business
organization, providing capabilities of centralized
cooling towers and many more. Servers are the main
consumers of energy because they are in huge number and
their size continuously increases with the increase in the size
storage, backups, management, networking and
dissemination of data in which the mechanical, lighting, of data centers. This increased consumption of energy
electrical and computing systems are designed for causes an increase in the production of green house gases
maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental which are hazardous for environmental health.
impact [1]. Data centers are found in nearly every sector of
the economy, ranging from financial services, media, high‐ Virtualization technology is now becoming an
tech, universities, government institutions, and many important advancement in IT especially for business
others. They use and operate data centers to aid business organizations and has become a top to bottom overhaul of
processes, information management and communication the computing industry. Virtualization combines or divides
functions [2]. Due to rapid growth in the size of the data the computing resources of a server based environment to
centers there is a continuous increase in the demand for provide different operating environments using different
both the physical infrastructure and IT equipments, methodologies and techniques like hardware and software
resulting in continuous increase in energy consumption. partitioning or aggregation, partial or complete machine
simulation, emulation and time sharing [3].
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It enables running two or more operating systems
Mueen Uddin PHD student at Department of Information
System, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai 81310, Johor
simultaneously on a single machine. Virtual machine
Malaysia. monitor (VMM) or hypervisor is a software that provides
platform to host multiple operating systems running
Azizah .Abdul Rahman Assoc Prof. Department of Information
Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai 81310, Johor concurrently and sharing different resources among each
Malaysia. other to provide services to the end users depending on the
service levels defined before the processes [4].
How it can improve our businesses?
Types of virtualization technologies exist? 4.2.1.1 Inventory
It is very important for an organization to know in advance
What is cost/benefit ratio of virtualization?
the total content of its infrastructure before implementing
What new challenges it will bring to the business firm?
virtualization. This is the most important step in any
Structure of the virtualization solution being
virtualization project. There are many tools available from
implemented?
different vendors for performing initial analysis of an
Which applications or services are good virtualization
organization.
candidates?
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) tool
Which server platform best suited to support
provides different information like IP addressing, Operating
virtualization in the given data center?
System, installed applications and most importantly
A change is required to install new hardware that supports
4.2.1.3 Categorizing Application Resources
and delivers the best price and performance. This process
After categorizing servers into different resource pools,
ensures high availability of virtual workloads and also
applications will also be categorized as:
provides leaner and meaner resource pool of resources for
Commercial versus in‐house
these virtual workloads.
Custom applications
Legacy versus updated applications 4.2.3.1 Move to 64-Bit Architecture
Infrastructure applications One of the major issues in hardware maximization is the
Support to business applications proper utilization and availability of RAM for each virtual
Line of business applications machine. For this reason it is important to consider 64 bit
Mission critical applications architecture, which provides more utilization and
availability of RAM for all virtual and physical systems.
processors * number of cores).
4.2.4 Architecture
4.2.2 Type of Virtualization The architecture of a machine consists of set of different
After analyzing and categorizing servers, second step instructions that allow inspecting or modifying machine
defines virtualization in detail, its advantages, its types, state trapped when executed in any or most probably the
layers and most importantly vendor identification whose privileged mode [18]. To support proper hardware
product most suits and fulfills all criteria for data gathered utilization, it is important to update and revise whole
in first step. VMware Capacity Planner (VCP) tool can be datacenter architecture. To protect virtual workloads, x‐64
used when network size extends over 100 physical servers. systems should be linked to shared storage and arranged
It generates reports on server processor utilization including
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into some form of high availability clusters so as to computers to perform different simulations and
minimize the single point of failure. experiments.
machine. The benefits include savings on hardware and 5.6 Resource Sharing & Testing/QA
server, hence virtualization consolidates several such 5.7 Reusability & Manageability
applications, which are usually not written to co‐exist Virtualization can be used to retrofit new features in
within a single execution environment. Virtual machines existing operating systems without much overhead and
also provide secure, isolated sandboxes for running enables the tasks such as system migration, backup, and
entrusted applications, such as address obfuscation. Hence recovery easier and more manageable. It also provides an
Virtualization provides a secure and reliable mechanism for effective means of binary compatibility across all hardware
building secure computing platforms. and software platforms to enhance manageability among
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hardware maintenance in the middle of the business day.
[6] W. McNamara, G. Seimetz, K. A. Vales, “Best Practices
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multiple applications. Virtualization poses many challenges n_gov_agenda.pdf, 2008.
to the data center physical infrastructure like dynamic high
[14] www.technet.microsoft.com/en‐
can be met by row‐based cooling, scalable power and
us/security/cc184925.aspx
predictive management tools. These solutions are based on
[15] www.microsoft.com/downloads/detail.aspx?familyID=6
design principles that simultaneously resolve functional
7240676‐3148‐4e49‐943d‐4d9ea7f77730&displaylang=en
challenges and increase efficiency.
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[16] www.vmware.com/downloads/
[17] www.platesspin.com/products/powerrecon/
[18] www.reso‐
net.com/articles.asp?m=8#funder”Architectures
Author Biographies