Benchmarking Automated Hardware Management Technologies for Modern Data Centers and Cloud Environments

Traditional management standards are often insufficient to manage modern data centers at large scale, which motivates the community to propose and develop new management standards. The most popular traditional standard for monitoring and controlling the health and functionality of a system at hardware layer is Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). Redfish is a new hardware-based management technology designed as the next-generation management standard. The goal of this study is to investigate hardware management technologies and to find out if they are powerful enough to meet demands of modern data centers. Particularly, we focused on Redfish and IPMI, and we benchmarked and compared them from four different aspects: latency, scalability, reliability, and security. Our result shows that there is a trade-off between improving the performance of a system and increasing the security and the reliability of that. Our results show that Redfish is more secure and more reliable, but the performance of IPMI tends to be better.