CloudBridge: On integrated hardware-software consolidation

Abstract

Data center consolidation has emerged as an important tool to improve the hardware utilization of data centers and reduce delivery costs. Consolidation has traditionally used virtualization to consolidate multiple workloads as different virtual machines running on a shared physical server. Consolidation leads to reduction in the hardware and the facilities cost (e.g., space and energy) but does not reduce software maintenance cost, which is often proportional to the number of instances of the software. The ever-increasing proportion of software cost (labour and license) in data center operations make software consolidation an important tool in data centers. In this work, we investigate the problem of data center consolidation with the goal of minimizing the total costs in running a data center. We build on existing work on virtualization-driven hardware consolidation and software consolidation to design CloudBridge that reduces total data center cost. CloudBridge uses an algorithm for finding the optimal software consolidation level for workloads consolidated on a physical server. Further, it intelligently optimizes the tradeoff between hardware and software consolidation to identify suitable workloads that should be co-located on a shared physical server. We present both theoretical and experimental evidence that establishes the effectiveness of CloudBridge.