Increasing Cloud power efficiency through consolidation techniques

In the recent years, Cloud computing is emerging as the next big revolution of both computer networks and web provisioning. Due to its enormous promises, several vendors, such as Amazon and IBM, started designing, developing, and deploying Cloud solutions to optimize the usage of their own data centers. Unfortunately, several management issues of the Cloud are still open and deserve additional research. Among them, and fuelled by the emerging Green Computing research, Cloud architectures have to consolidate virtual machines in the minimal number of physical servers to reduce the run-time power consumption. In this paper, we present a project on power saving through server consolidation conducted at the IBM Innovation Centre in Dublin. Our experimental results, collected on a real testbed, show that server consolidation can effectively save energy, while introducing minimum performance degradation.