Data Center Workload Monitoring, Analysis, and Emulation

Overview

Over the last ten years the author has witnessed a shift from large mainframe computing to commodity, off-the-shelf clusters of servers. Today's data centers contain thousands or tens of thousands of servers, providing services and computation for tens or hundreds of thousands of users. In addition to traditional IT challenges such as server management, security, and performance, data center owners now must deal with power and thermal issues, previously the domain of facilities management. These trends will continue to accelerate as organizations acquire bladed servers and consolidate multiple, smaller clusters into centrally-located data centers. However, in spite of these trends, there has been no corresponding change in emphasis in the methods and toolkits that target system instrumentation, analysis, management, replay, and emulation.