Orchestrating connectivity services to support elastic operations in datacenter federations

Datacenter federations are able to manage appropriately the green energy resources available in each datacenter (DC) thanks to their geographically distributed infrastructure, thus reducing energy expenditure. Scheduling algorithms can compute virtual machine migration, transferring huge amounts of raw data from one DC to another to minimize operational costs and ensuring a certain Quality of Experience. Because green energy availability greatly depends on weather conditions, in this work we present a statistical model to improve green solar energy availability estimation accuracy and we use it in a mixed integer linear programming formulation to compute optimal virtual machine placement. Optical connections can be used to provide connectivity services of enough capacity to support those migrations. In particular, elastic optical networks can provide connections with multi-granular bitrate, which can be adapted on demand. DC resource managers can request optical connections and control their capacity. However, that scheme involves the resource managers to implement algorithms and interfaces to deal with network specifics and complexity. To solve that issue, in this paper we propose coordinating transfer-based inter-DC connectivity services; inter-DC connectivity is requested in terms of volume of data and completion time. We analyze cost savings when each connectivity model is applied in a DC federation. For the sake of a compelling analysis, exhaustive simulation experiments are carried out considering realistic scenarios. Results show that the notification-based model can save up to 20 % of energy costs and more than 40 % of communication costs in the evaluated scenarios.