Unified resource management in cloud based data centers

Maintaining a high and efficient resource utilization level is highly desirable in a cloud based data center. This keeps the costs low for both the cloud provider and users. However, managing and allocating resources to different hosted applications is challenging. The reason is the diverse set of data center resources namely computing, memory, storage and network, and a diverse set of applications like web services, databases, big data analytics, mail servers and many more. In fact, an optimal resource allocation to applications in cloud based data center is found to be an intractable task. Currently available resource management and allocation schemes are heuristics which manage only a subset of available resource types. Applying such schemes result in resource fragmentation where some available resources become unusable due to the unavailability of other resources. Such unusability of available resources results in inefficiency and negatively impacts data center’s and application performance and bringing up the costs. In this paper, we first present the reasons, due to which, such resource fragmentation occurs. Then we present the approach to avoid such wastage of data center resources. Experiments show that the proposed approach results in up to 60% more applications to be hosted in data center than current schemes and thus improves resource utilization efficiency.