Improving Datacenter Operations Management Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Increasingly larger data centers constructed to serve Internet-scale enterprise and Cloud computing workloads are creating significant challenges for the management systems designed to operate them. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a management system that uses server-attached wireless sensors to create an auto-configuring wireless-only monitoring network that can be used to address a number of challenges in the area of data center operations management. We exhibit the use of this wireless network in tracking the physical location of servers and in troubleshooting connectivity problems in the wired data center network infrastructure. Our system is implemented as an extension to the Nagios distributed monitoring and management system and demonstrated to provide continuous awareness of the physical location of the server infrastructure as well as insight into wired network partitions under switch failures.