GreenEDFS: Saving Energy in the Clouds Using an Efficient Distributed File System

This is just a short abstract describing a simple extension of our previous work on efficient distributed file system (EDFS) for cloud computing. The extension, GreenEDFS, aims at making EDFS more energy efficient. The GreenEDFS scheme uses EDFS mechanism to constantly monitor the cloud resources. It then moves computation, communication and storage loads from less loaded (under utilized) areas of the cloud to other less loaded areas of the cloud by ensuring full resource utilization and avoiding unnecessary over-utilization (buffers, delays and losses). GreenEDFS moves load (computation, communication, storage) from one area of the cloud to the other every greening periods. These periods can be user defined or obtained and triggered using some clever ways, for instance when the load in a given cloud node gets below a certain threshold or when there are some user-defined number of under-utilized resources. The movement of traffic in the cloud (greening) can be done both at a local cloud rack level or globally by going all the way up in the cloud structure the same way EDFS performs the resource allocation. The scheme dynamically expands and contracts the cloud size based on the demands and continuous moni- toring provided by EDFS. This can result in a clever significant energy saving mechanism without compromising performance. We are working to demonstrate the energy saving of our scheme using simulation and real testbeds.unpublishednot peer reviewe