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Section: Application Domains
Control of data centers
Data centers are another example of a large scale reconfigurable and
distributed system: they are composed of thousands of servers on
which Virtual Machines (VM) can be (de)activated, migrated,
etc. depending on the requests of the customers, on the load of the
servers and on the power consumption. Autonomic management
functionalities already exist to deploy and configure applications
in such a distributed environment. They can also monitor the
environment and react to events such as failures or overloads and
reconfigure applications and/or infrastructures accordingly and
autonomously. To supervise these systems, Autonomic Managers (AM)
can be deployed in order to apply administration policies of
specific aspects to the different entities of a data center
(servers, VM, web services, power supply, etc). These AMs may be
implemented in different layers: the hardware level, the operating
system level or the middleware level. Therefore several control
loops may coexists, and they have to take globally consistent
decisions to manage the trade-off between availability, performance,
scalability, security and energy consumption. This leads to
multi-criteria optimization and control problems in order to
automatically derive controllers in charge of the coordination of
the different AMs. We are relatively new on this topic, that will
require more technical investment. But we are driven to it
by both the convergence of IT and networking, by virtualization
techniques that reach networks (see the growing research effort
about network operating systems), and by the call for more
automation in the management of clouds. We believe our experience in
network management can help. Some members of the SUMO team are already
involved in the ANR Ctrl-Green, which addresses the controller
coordination problem. We are also in contact with the Myriads team,
which research interests moved from OS for grids/clouds to autonomic
methods. This is supported as well by the activities of b