An Edge Computing Platform for Intelligent Operational Monitoring in Internet Data Centers

The increasing demand for cloud-based services, such as big data analytics and online e-commerce, leads to rapid growth of large-scale internet data centers. In order to provide highly reliable, cost effective, and high quality cloud services, data centers are equipped with sensors to monitor the operational states of infrastructure hardware, such as servers, storage arrays, networking devices, and computer room air conditioning systems. However, such coarse grained monitoring cannot provide fine grained real time information for resource multiplexing and job scheduling. Moreover, the monitoring of node level power consumption plays an important role in the optimization of workload placement and energy efficiency in data centers. In this paper, we propose an edge computing platform for intelligent operational monitoring in data centers. The platform integrates wireless sensors and on-board built-in sensors to collect data during the operation and maintenance of data centers. Using logical functions, we divide the data center clusters into grids, and then deploy wireless sensors and edge servers in each grid. As such, data processing on edge servers can reduce the latency in data transmission to central clouds and thereby enhance the real time resource mapping decisions in data centers. In addition, the proposed platform also provides predictions of resource utilization, workload characteristics, and hardware health trends in data centers.