In today’s ICT world, companies supplying services over the Internet typically need to over-provision their servers by as much as a 500 percent to handle peak loads. However, over-provisioning is expensive not only in terms of capital costs and the cost of the housing of the physical equipment, but also in terms of cooling and supplying electricity to the mainly idle spare machines. In fact, it has been estimated that data centers consume 1%-2% of the world’s electricity, and this percentage is rapidly growing.
RESERVOIR – Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers, a FP7 project, is developing a blueprint which will enable researchers to introduce new innovations in this field. In fact, a number of RESERVOIR partners have already taken this blueprint as a basis for continued Green IT research in a call 5 FP7 proposal called PRECISE. Developing the next generation in Cloud Computing, RESERVOIR will provide a reference architecture for a cost-competitive, service-based online economy where resources and services are transparently and flexibly provisioned and managed like utilities. Instead of static over-provisioning, RESERVOIR will allow for the nimble relocation of resources while at the same time ensuring Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance and security guarantees.
Using sophisticated policy placement algorithms, RESERVOIR can move virtual machines not only across a given cloud, but also between clouds, as a first step in meeting energy saving policies. For example, while a site administrator can choose a placement policy to balance work loads across physical machines, the administrator can equally pick a policy to reduce energy consumption, consolidating virtual machines on a small number of physical servers, allowing the now unused servers to be shut down to conserver power. A demonstration of this capability was shown in a joint IBM-SAP RESERVOIR demo at CeBIT2009 and can be seen at CEBIT Demo . It is foreseen that this work can be extended to use a placement policy which will minimize the amount of cooling which is required in a data center.
RESERVOIR in more details
The RESERVOIR project started in February 2008, and is composed of thirteen partners from representing leading ICT companies, cutting edge SMEs, standardization organizations and top European universities. A three year project with a budget of over seventeen million euro, RESERVOIR has already made a major impact, being picked as one of the top 100 players in cloud computing SYS-CON Cloud Computing Journal, highlighted in the MIT Technology Review , and producing a long list of publications .
In addition to the CeBIT demo, RESERVOIR also displayed the results of its first year of work at the Internet of Services conference in Brussels, in June 2009. This demonstration showed how virtual machines running the Sun Grid Engine for image rendering could be automatically relocated in real time to a different physical host based on administrator selected policy, such as load balancing or energy conservation.
Continuing work is focusing on federating cooperating RESERVOIR clouds to provide for what is known as cloud bursting – the ability to move an application, or even part of a complex application from one cloud to another cloud to meet policy decisions. This allows for a higher degree of flexibility to reduce energy costs – for example, applications could be shifted across geographically distant clouds to take advantage of off peak electricity rates and capacities in the different cloud zones.