Unified Data Center:Monitoring And Management

Modern data centers are playing an important role in a world full of information and communications technologies (ICTs). Many efforts have been paid to build a more efficient, cleaner data center for economic, social, and environmental benefits. This objective is being enabled by emerging technologies such as cloud computing and soft-ware defined networking (SDN). However, a data center is inherently heterogeneous, consisting of servers, networking devices, cooling devices, power supply devices, etc., resulting in daunting challenges in its management and control. In a similar context of networking device heterogeneity, SDN propose to offer a standard abstract interface to manage all networking devices. Following the design princeples of unified interfaces, we propose to build a suit of unified middleware to monitor and management the three intrinsic subsystems in a data centre, including ICT, power, and cooling. Specifically, we present a unified scalable IP-based data collection system for data center manage-ment with elevated extensibility, as an initial step to offer a unified platform for data center operations. The data center monitoring subsystem consists of three main parts, i.e., data-source adapters for information collection over various subsystems in a data center, a unified message bus for data transferring, and a high-performance database for persistent data storage. We conduct performance benchmark for the key building components, namely messaging server and database, confirming that our monitoring system is scalable for a data center with high device density and real-time management requirements. Key features, such as configuration files, dynamical module loading, data compression, and desynchronization, enhance our implementation with high extensibil-ity and performance. The data center management subsystem resuses the message bus for device management command transfer and has adapters to provide high level in-terfaces for device management. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed design, we present sample applications, such as, traffic flow migration for load balancing, VM migration for resource reservation, and server power management for hardware safety. This research lays out a foundation for a unified data centre management in future.