%0 Journal Article
%T Deployment of a Hybrid Multicast Switch in Energy-Aware Data Center Network: A Case of Fat-Tree Topology
%A Tosmate Cheocherngngarn
%A Jean Andrian
%A Deng Pan
%J ISRN Communications and Networking
%D 2012
%R 10.5402/2012/209573
%X Recently, energy efficiency or green IT has become a hot issue for many IT infrastructures as they attempt to utilize energy-efficient strategies in their enterprise IT systems in order to minimize operational costs. Networking devices are shared resources connecting important IT infrastructures, especially in a data center network they are always operated 24/7 which consume a huge amount of energy, and it has been obviously shown that this energy consumption is largely independent of the traffic through the devices. As a result, power consumption in networking devices is becoming more and more a critical problem, which is of interest for both research community and general public. Multicast benefits group communications in saving link bandwidth and improving application throughput, both of which are important for green data center. In this paper, we study the deployment strategy of multicast switches in hybrid mode in energy-aware data center network: a case of famous fat-tree topology. The objective is to find the best location to deploy multicast switch not only to achieve optimal bandwidth utilization but also to minimize power consumption. We show that it is possible to easily achieve nearly 50% of energy consumption after applying our proposed algorithm. 1. Introduction Data centers aim to provide reliable and scalable computing infrastructure for massive information and services. Accordingly, they consume huge amounts of energy and exponentially increase operational costs. According to recent literature, the annual electricity consumed by data centers in the United States is 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5 percent of total US electricity consumption) for a total electricity cost of about $4.5 billion. The energy use of the nationĄ¯s servers and data centers in 2006 is estimated to be more than double the electricity that was consumed for this purpose in 2000 [1]. Energy efficiency has become nontrivial for all industries, including the information technology (IT) industry, since there is a big motivation to reduce capital and energy costs. According to Figure 1, the global information and communications technology (ICT) industry accounts for approximately 2 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions; the figure is equivalent to aviation in 2007. Most likely, ICT use grows faster than airline traffic in the past few years [2]. In addition, with energy management schemes, we turn to a part of the data center that consumes 10¨C20% of its total power: the network [3]. Thereby presenting a strong case for reducing the energy consumed
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.communications.networking/2012/209573/