Server consolidation: A technique to enhance cloud data center power efficiency and overall cost of ownership

Cloud computing is a well-known technology that provides flexible, efficient, and cost-effective information technology solutions for multinationals to offer improved and enhanced quality of business services to end-users. The cloud computing paradigm is instigated from grid and parallel computing models as it uses virtualization, server consolidation, utility computing, and other computing technologies and models for providing better information technology solutions for large-scale computational data centers. The recent intensifying computational demands from multinationals enterprises have motivated the magnification for large complicated cloud data centers to handle business, monetary, Internet, and commercial applications of different enterprises. A cloud data center encompasses thousands of millions of physical server machines arranged in racks along with network, storage, and other equipment that entails an extensive amount of power to process different processes and amenities required by business firms to run their business applications. This data center infrastructure leads to different challenges like enormous power consumption, underutilization of installed equipment especially physical server machines, CO2 emission causing global warming, and so on. In this article, we highlight the data center issues in the context of Pakistan where the data center industry is facing huge power deficits and shortcomings to fulfill the power demands to provide data and operational services to business enterprises. The research investigates these challenges and provides solutions to reduce the number of installed physical server machines and their related device equipment. In this article, we proposed server consolidation technique to increase the utilization of already existing server machines and their workloads by migrating them to virtual server machines to implement green energy-efficient cloud data centers. To achieve this objective, we also introduced a novel Virtualized Task Scheduling Algorithm to manage and properly distribute the physical server machine workloads onto virtual server machines. The results are generated from a case study performed in Pakistan where the proposed server consolidation technique and virtualized task scheduling algorithm are applied on a tier-level data center. The results obtained from the case study demonstrate that there are annual power savings of 23,600 W and overall cost savings of US$78,362. The results also highlight that the utilization ratio of already existing physical server machines has increased to 30% compared to 10%, whereas the number of server machines has reduced to 50% contributing enormously toward huge power savings.