Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 3, numbers 1 and 2, 2010 // View article

A Proactive Energy-Efficient Technique for Change Management in Computing Clouds

Authors:
Hady AbdelSalam
Kurt Maly
Ravi Mukkamala
Mohamed Zubair
David Kaminksy

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Autonomic Manager, Policy languages, Change Management, Energy Efficient.

Abstract:
The intensive use of portable and thin client devices along with the continuously increasing cost of IT management have pushed large IT companies to look for solutions that allow the use of such devices to access the massive computing power of supercomputers available at the company. The cloud computing concept has emerged with promises to simplify and speed up application deployment and maintenance. All these benefits should be provided for a small fraction of current maintenance cost. To be able to provide services to its customers, a cloud requires high level of maintenance and an appropriate strategy for change management. Replacing defective items (hardware/software), applying security patches, or upgrading firmware are just few examples of typical maintenance procedures needed in such environment. While taking resources down for maintenance, applying efficient change management techniques is a key factor to the success of the cloud. Moreover, the increasing cost of energy consumption in such systems has imposed an additional constraint on proposed techniques making the problem more challenging. In this paper, we propose a proactive energy efficient technique for change management in cloud computing environments. We formulate the management problem into an optimization problem to minimize the total energy consumption of the cloud. We validate our analytical model by providing scenarios that illustrate the mathematical relationships for a sample cloud and that provide a range of possible power consumption savings for different environments.

Pages: 310 to 322

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: September 5, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644