Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Exploiting Transient Servers in Datacenters

Author

Singh, Rajdeep ; Sharma, Parmanand ; Irwin, David ; Shenoy, Prashant ; Ramakrishnan, K.K.

Volume

18

Issue

4

fYear

2014

fDate

July-Aug. 2014

Firstpage

22

Lastpage

29

Abstract

Distributed applications assume that datacenter servers are available unless they fail. Transient servers, which are available temporarily for an uncertain amount of time, are cheaper and more energy efficient than stable servers, which have continuous availability. This article looks at an important characteristic of transient servers: advance warning of unavailability. The Yank system defines a bounded-time virtual machine migration mechanism that leverages an advance warning of a few seconds to provide high availability cheaply and efficiently at large scales.

Keywords

client-server systems; cloud computing; computer centres; power aware computing; virtual machines; Yank system; bounded-time virtual machine migration mechanism; cloud computing; data centers; distributed applications; transient servers; Availability; Bandwidth; Engines; Image restoration; Servers; Time factors; Transient analysis; high availability; migration; transience; virtualization;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Internet Computing, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1089-7801

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MIC.2014.40

Filename

6785927