Storage-aware Server Consolidation for Cloud Services Utilizing Local Storage

Server consolidation is one of the critical techniques for energy-efficiency in cloud data centers. As it is often assumed that cloud service instances (e.g., Amazon EC2 instances) utilize the shared storage only, most existing work did not consider the problems introduced by utilizing local storage. In recent years, however, cloud service providers have been providing local storage for cloud users, e.g., Amazon EC2, Aliyun ECS and RDS, since local storage can offer a better performance with identified price. Thus, several problems might be incurred, e.g., migrating much more data, consuming much more migration time and network bandwidth. To address these problems, this paper proposes SaSercon, a storage-aware server consolidation approach to minimize the total migrated data size (stored on the local storage) by releasing the servers which utilize lower data size. Evaluation results on production traces demonstrate that SaSercon significantly reduces the total migrated data size.