Energy Efficient Data Center Networks - A SDN based approach

by
Kakadia Dharmesh, Vasudeva Varma
in
IBM Collaborative Academia Research Exchange (I-CARE)
IISC, Bangalore, India
Report No: IIIT/TR/2012/-1
Centre for Search and Information Extraction Lab
International Institute of Information Technology
Hyderabad - 500 032, INDIA
October 2012
Energy Efcient Data Center Networks - A SDN based
approach
Dharmesh Kakadia
Search and Information Extraction Lab,
International Institute of Information Technology
Hyderabad, India
dharmesh.kakadia@research.iiit.ac.in
Vasudeva Varma
Search and Information Extraction Lab,
International Institute of Information Technology
Hyderabad, India
vv@iiit.ac.in
ABSTRACT
The energy consumption in data center is a key component
in sustainable growth of paradigms like cloud computing.
As servers are becoming more and more energy ecient, the
concerns around network power consumption are increasing.
We propose an approach to dynamically decide the number
of network devices required to support the current load. In
this paper, we evaluate our approach and report ndings in
terms of energy saving and performance of the network.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.1 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Network
Architecture and DesignNetwork communications, Net-
work topology; C.4 [Performance Of Systems]: Reliabil-
ity, availability, and serviceability
Keywords
Data Center Network, Energy Eciency, Software Dened
Networking
1. INTRODUCTION
The success of cloud computing is motivated by the abil-
ity to deliver reliable services while operating at very large
scale. While the use of commodity hardware at scale allows
operators to amortize initial investments, the operational
cost (OPEX) of cloud-scale data center infrastructure is a
major issue. The energy consumption accounts for a ma-
jor part of the operational cost of a data center and has
environment consequences. Greenberg et al. show [3] that
servers and network components are responsible for nearly
45% and 15% of the amortized cost of a cloud scale data cen-
ters, respectively and argue that, innovations are necessary
for making data center networks energy ecient. The in-
creasing shift towards green computing has generated a lot
of interest in research community towards energy propor-
tional computing. Although there has been signicant work
around making servers more energy ecient, the research in
energy ecient networks deserves more attention.
Abts et al. [2], suggest that, current attened network
topologies are ecient in terms of energy usage and propose
an approach for making explicit power performance trade-
o on the modern links. ElasticTree [4] is a network-wide
energy manager which attempts to save energy by shutting
down the network elements. It formalizes the problem as
an optimization problem and uses the solution to decide the
required active devices and links in the system.
Software Dened Networking (SDN) refers to the network-
ing architecture where control and data plane functionalities
are separated and control plane is implemented in software.
OpenFlow [7] is an open interface, which gives the central-
ized abstraction for remotely controlling the forwarding ta-
bles in network devices. This allows applications to be de-
veloped using a centralized ow abstraction without dealing
with the heterogeneous distributed nature of the underlying
network.
2. PROPOSED SOLUTION
Current networks are designed for peak load and it is well
known that they are not power proportional [6]. Power con-
trol in network switches is available at two levels - ports and
switch. Turning o a port does not yield signicant power
savings as the power consumption of a switch varies less than
8% when the trac goes from zero to full capacity.
Consolidation
Update Traffic Counters
For each Switch s such that
Utilization(s) < Threshold
do{
Migrate Flows from s
Power-off s
}end for
Figure 1: Proposed Solution
Our focus is on determining the minimal set of network
switches required to meet the demand on network as shown
in Figure 1. This approach is dierent from the one taken
by ElasticTree. Instead of calculating all the optimal paths
in the data center at once and powering switches up/down
in batch mode, we calculate the devices to be turned o/on
incrementally. Without explicit constraints, optimization
based approach may require completely dierent subsets of
the network to be powered on in successive iterations, which
can lead to instability. Our goal is to minimize the en-
ergy consumption of the data center network without ad-
versely aecting its performance and we believe incremental
approach is more practical towards this goal.
We use OpenFlow counters for gathering trac informa-
tion about the network and detect the switches that are
having minimal trac. From each of such switches, we try
to consolidate the ows to other switches. While consolidat-
ing, we reserve 20% ow capacity of switches to take care of
sudden surge in trac.
Our approach is independent of the topology and cong-
uration of the network. It is important to note that our
approach does not assume the power proportionality of net-
work devices, but it can take advantage of this behavior that
is likely to be available in future devices by putting them in
sleep mode.
3. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS
We evaluated our algorithm using mininet simulator [5]
with simulation parameters of a typical data center running
commodity servers and network gears, shown in Table 1.
We used Floodlight (v0.85) as our openow controller [1],
hosted on a 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM machine with Ubuntu 12.04.
For each machine we generated packets to randomly chosen
other hosts for required number of ows using Iperf.
Table 1: Simulation Setup
Parameter Value
Number of Hosts 2000
Number of Edge Switches 100
Topology FatTree
Link Capacity 100 MBPS
Switch booting time 90 sec
Number of Ports per Switch 24
Figure 2 shows the eectiveness of the algorithm in con-
solidating the ows on switches. When the number of ows
is relatively small, the number of switches required is sub-
linear in ows. As the number of ows increase, the algo-
rithm requires a little more than a linear increase in switches.
This is expected as with large number of ows the consoli-
dation becomes more and more complex. All the results are
reported over 15 experiments. The number of switches in
the higher layer is not shown in the gure.
Figure 2: Consolidation performance
We measured the eect of the consolidation on the perfor-
mance of the network through maximum delay experienced
by the ow packets with consolidation and the results are
shown in Figure 3. The algorithm managed to keep the de-
lay variance within 30 s and the average delay being 99
s. These results are encouraging because, in normal case
without consolidation, the delay variance was 22 s and the
average delay was 84 s without any consolidation being
applied. This shows eectiveness of our approach towards
the goal of saving energy while minimizing the performance
eects on the network due to consolidation.
Figure 3: Eect of consolidation on delay
Without the use of consolidation, all the network switches
have to be kept switched on all the time resulting in substan-
tial waste of energy by idle switches, which can be avoided
using our approach.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this work, we have demonstrated that simple techniques
can result into signicant energy savings without compro-
mising on the performance of the network. Our algorithm
was able to achieve nearly linear power consumption behav-
ior with trac load on the network maintaining the delay
characteristics.
In future, we would like to study the eect on fault-tolerance
due to consolidation under various topologies and tracs.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Floodlight OpenFlow Controller.
http://floodlight.openflowhub.org/.
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