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Title Date Added Company

Data Center Projects: Establishing a Floor Plan 2007-04-28 American Power Conversion (APC)

A floor plan strongly affects the power density capability and electrical efficiency of a data center. Despite this critical role in data center design, many floor plans are established through incremental deployment without a central plan. Once a poor floor plan has been deployed, it is often difficult or impossible to recover the resulting loss of performance. This paper provides structured floor plan guidelines for defining room layouts and for establishing IT equipment layouts within existing rooms.

Capacity and Performance Overhead in Dynamic Resource Allocation to Virtual Containers 2007-04-24 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Off late enterprise data centers are shifting towards a utility computing model where many business critical applications share a common pool of infrastructure resources that offer capacity on demand. Management of such a pool requires having a control system that can dynamically allocate resources to applications in real time. Although this is possible by use of virtualization technologies, capacity overhead or actuation delay may occur due to frequent re-scheduling in the virtualization layer. This paper evaluates the overhead of a dynamic allocation scheme in both system capacity and application-level performance relative to static allocation. The paper conducted experiments with virtual containers built using Xen and OpenVZ technologies for hosting both computational and transactional workloads.

Tags: Server Consolidation, Virtualization

Best Practices for Designing Data Centers With the InfraStruXure InRow RC 2007-04-20 American Power Conversion (APC)

The InfraStruXure InRow RC is designed to provide cooling at the row and rack level of a data center for rack based IT equipment with front to back airflow. When designing data centers with this product, there are some best practices that should be followed to ensure the InRow RC is cooling as designed. This paper presents the best practices that should be followed when designing a data center with the InRow RC, and provides some additional guidelines to follow when some of these best practices can not be adopted as part of the data center layout.

Cost-Aware Scheduling for Heterogeneous Enterprise Machines (CASH'EM) 2007-04-17 Hewlett-Packard (HP)

Data centers contain heterogeneous sets of machines. Some machines are faster and some - often the same ones - consume more energy and cost more to operate. The data center coordinator must decide how to allocate these machines to multiple applications of potentially many customers, each of which has different requirements. Given a stream of customer requests for machines, how does the data center provider decide which machines to give to whom and when? The paper proposes new algorithms for a cost-aware provider to maximize its profit as it makes admission and scheduling decisions for the customer requests. The paper shows that it matters which machines are assigned to each customer, especially when the data center is undersaturated.

Five Strategies for Cutting Data Center Energy Costs Through Enhanced Cooling Efficiency 2007-04-17 Emerson Electric

As electricity prices and IT power consumption continue to rise, IT-related energy costs are getting increased scrutiny. Cooling accounts for approximately 37 percent of electricity usage within a well-designed data center and, in many cases, represents a significant opportunity to reduce IT energy costs. This paper presents five strategies for increasing data center cooling efficiency. Together, these methods can reduce cooling system energy costs by 30 to 45 percent and generate significant, recurring savings. Coupled with emerging technologies such as higher-efficiency processors and new chip-based cooling technologies, these measures can keep energy costs in line as server densities and the price of energy continue to rise.

Tags: Cost Control - Risk Mgmt.

Using Virtualization and Digital Control Technologies to Increase Data Center Operating Efficiency 2007-04-16 Liebert

Data center professionals continue to be squeezed on several fronts as they seek to optimize operational readiness, availability, and risk management for operations on a local, regional or global basis. These include battling legacy hardware/infrastructure transitions, increasing power and heat densities, escalating service-level availability agreements, risk management and expense control. There are digital systems available today that provide a framework within which data center professionals can manage their entire suite of hardware and software assets in a real-time, cost/risk-optimized manner. These systems can immediately reduce costs and improve performance of the data center infrastructure.

Tags: Virtualization

I/O Virtualization for Next-Generation Datacenters 2007-04-16 Xsigo Systems

This paper describes the emerging needs for an I/O virtualization platform as an enabling technology for on-demand datacenters. Current datacenters suffer from poor resource utilization and a rigid architecture. I/O virtualization is a key technology that can be used to transform the constrained datacenters of today to agile datacenters where resources can be easily re-purposed for different applications and users based on changing needs. The paper focuses on the Xsigo I/O virtualization platform that was designed to be a valuable element of the new datacenter architecture. Support for Microsoft Windows operating systems and virtualization software is a key aspect of this product.

Tags: Virtualization

Analysis of Server Consolidation in the Data Center: VMware Vs. Virtuozzo 2007-04-01 Parallels (formerly SWsoft)

The reduction of the physical number of servers in a modern-day IT organization, otherwise known as "server consolidation," is of utmost importance to IT managers, who are forced to look for ways to reduce the time and money associated with maintaining their hardware and software. The apparent leader in this emerging field is IBM, with vast experience supporting multiple machine partitions using mainframe technologies. IBM is coupling the Open Source Linux OS with the mainframe in an attempt to push Linux server consolidation onto their zSeries. Sun Microsystems has also entered the server consolidation field with their high-end enterprise servers using a dynamic domain partitioning technology.

Tags: Server Consolidation

Adaptive Control of Virtualized Resources in Utility Computing Environments 2007-03-23 Association for Computing Machinery

Data centers are often under-utilized due to over-provisioning as well as time-varying resource demands of typical enterprise applications. One approach to increase resource utilization is to consolidate applications in a shared infrastructure using virtualization. Meeting application-level Quality of Service (QoS) goals becomes a challenge in a consolidated environment as application resource needs differ. Further-more, for multi-tier applications, the amount of resources needed to achieve their QoS goals might be different at each tier and may also depend on availability of resources in other tiers. This paper develops an adaptive resource control system that dynamically adjusts the resource shares to individual tiers in order to meet application-level QoS goals while achieving high resource utilization in the data center.

Tags: High Performance Computing, Virtualization

Server Virtualization in Autonomic Management of Heterogeneous Workloads 2007-03-23 Technical University of Catalonia

Server virtualization opens up a range of new possibilities for autonomic datacenter management, through the availability of new automation mechanisms that can be exploited to control and monitor tasks running within virtual machines. This offers not only new and more flexible control to the operator using a management console, but also more powerful and flexible autonomic control, through management software that maintains the system in a desired state in the face of changing workload and demand. This paper explores in particular the use of server virtualization technology in the autonomic management of data centers running a heterogeneous mix of workloads. This paper presents a system that manages heterogeneous workloads to their performance goals and demonstrates its effectiveness via real-system experiments and simulation.

Tags: Virtualization

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Title	Date Added	Company
Data Center Projects: Establishing a Floor Plan	2007-04-28	American Power Conversion (APC)
A floor plan strongly affects the power density capability and electrical efficiency of a data center. Despite this critical role in data center design, many floor plans are established through incremental deployment without a central plan. Once a poor floor plan has been deployed, it is often difficult or impossible to recover the resulting loss of performance. This paper provides structured floor plan guidelines for defining room layouts and for establishing IT equipment layouts within existing rooms.
Capacity and Performance Overhead in Dynamic Resource Allocation to Virtual Containers	2007-04-24	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Off late enterprise data centers are shifting towards a utility computing model where many business critical applications share a common pool of infrastructure resources that offer capacity on demand. Management of such a pool requires having a control system that can dynamically allocate resources to applications in real time. Although this is possible by use of virtualization technologies, capacity overhead or actuation delay may occur due to frequent re-scheduling in the virtualization layer. This paper evaluates the overhead of a dynamic allocation scheme in both system capacity and application-level performance relative to static allocation. The paper conducted experiments with virtual containers built using Xen and OpenVZ technologies for hosting both computational and transactional workloads. Tags: Server Consolidation, Virtualization
Best Practices for Designing Data Centers With the InfraStruXure InRow RC	2007-04-20	American Power Conversion (APC)
The InfraStruXure InRow RC is designed to provide cooling at the row and rack level of a data center for rack based IT equipment with front to back airflow. When designing data centers with this product, there are some best practices that should be followed to ensure the InRow RC is cooling as designed. This paper presents the best practices that should be followed when designing a data center with the InRow RC, and provides some additional guidelines to follow when some of these best practices can not be adopted as part of the data center layout.
Cost-Aware Scheduling for Heterogeneous Enterprise Machines (CASH'EM)	2007-04-17	Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Data centers contain heterogeneous sets of machines. Some machines are faster and some - often the same ones - consume more energy and cost more to operate. The data center coordinator must decide how to allocate these machines to multiple applications of potentially many customers, each of which has different requirements. Given a stream of customer requests for machines, how does the data center provider decide which machines to give to whom and when? The paper proposes new algorithms for a cost-aware provider to maximize its profit as it makes admission and scheduling decisions for the customer requests. The paper shows that it matters which machines are assigned to each customer, especially when the data center is undersaturated.
Five Strategies for Cutting Data Center Energy Costs Through Enhanced Cooling Efficiency	2007-04-17	Emerson Electric
As electricity prices and IT power consumption continue to rise, IT-related energy costs are getting increased scrutiny. Cooling accounts for approximately 37 percent of electricity usage within a well-designed data center and, in many cases, represents a significant opportunity to reduce IT energy costs. This paper presents five strategies for increasing data center cooling efficiency. Together, these methods can reduce cooling system energy costs by 30 to 45 percent and generate significant, recurring savings. Coupled with emerging technologies such as higher-efficiency processors and new chip-based cooling technologies, these measures can keep energy costs in line as server densities and the price of energy continue to rise. Tags: Cost Control - Risk Mgmt.
Using Virtualization and Digital Control Technologies to Increase Data Center Operating Efficiency	2007-04-16	Liebert
Data center professionals continue to be squeezed on several fronts as they seek to optimize operational readiness, availability, and risk management for operations on a local, regional or global basis. These include battling legacy hardware/infrastructure transitions, increasing power and heat densities, escalating service-level availability agreements, risk management and expense control. There are digital systems available today that provide a framework within which data center professionals can manage their entire suite of hardware and software assets in a real-time, cost/risk-optimized manner. These systems can immediately reduce costs and improve performance of the data center infrastructure. Tags: Virtualization
I/O Virtualization for Next-Generation Datacenters	2007-04-16	Xsigo Systems
This paper describes the emerging needs for an I/O virtualization platform as an enabling technology for on-demand datacenters. Current datacenters suffer from poor resource utilization and a rigid architecture. I/O virtualization is a key technology that can be used to transform the constrained datacenters of today to agile datacenters where resources can be easily re-purposed for different applications and users based on changing needs. The paper focuses on the Xsigo I/O virtualization platform that was designed to be a valuable element of the new datacenter architecture. Support for Microsoft Windows operating systems and virtualization software is a key aspect of this product. Tags: Virtualization
Analysis of Server Consolidation in the Data Center: VMware Vs. Virtuozzo	2007-04-01	Parallels (formerly SWsoft)
The reduction of the physical number of servers in a modern-day IT organization, otherwise known as "server consolidation," is of utmost importance to IT managers, who are forced to look for ways to reduce the time and money associated with maintaining their hardware and software. The apparent leader in this emerging field is IBM, with vast experience supporting multiple machine partitions using mainframe technologies. IBM is coupling the Open Source Linux OS with the mainframe in an attempt to push Linux server consolidation onto their zSeries. Sun Microsystems has also entered the server consolidation field with their high-end enterprise servers using a dynamic domain partitioning technology. Tags: Server Consolidation
Adaptive Control of Virtualized Resources in Utility Computing Environments	2007-03-23	Association for Computing Machinery
Data centers are often under-utilized due to over-provisioning as well as time-varying resource demands of typical enterprise applications. One approach to increase resource utilization is to consolidate applications in a shared infrastructure using virtualization. Meeting application-level Quality of Service (QoS) goals becomes a challenge in a consolidated environment as application resource needs differ. Further-more, for multi-tier applications, the amount of resources needed to achieve their QoS goals might be different at each tier and may also depend on availability of resources in other tiers. This paper develops an adaptive resource control system that dynamically adjusts the resource shares to individual tiers in order to meet application-level QoS goals while achieving high resource utilization in the data center. Tags: High Performance Computing, Virtualization
Server Virtualization in Autonomic Management of Heterogeneous Workloads	2007-03-23	Technical University of Catalonia
Server virtualization opens up a range of new possibilities for autonomic datacenter management, through the availability of new automation mechanisms that can be exploited to control and monitor tasks running within virtual machines. This offers not only new and more flexible control to the operator using a management console, but also more powerful and flexible autonomic control, through management software that maintains the system in a desired state in the face of changing workload and demand. This paper explores in particular the use of server virtualization technology in the autonomic management of data centers running a heterogeneous mix of workloads. This paper presents a system that manages heterogeneous workloads to their performance goals and demonstrates its effectiveness via real-system experiments and simulation. Tags: Virtualization