Energy Efficient Resource Utilization: Architecture for Enterprise Network

Abstract

Enterprise networks usually require all the computing machines to remain accessible (switched-on) at all times regardless of the workload in order to entertain user requests at any instant. This comes at the cost of excessive energy utilization. Many solutions have been put forwarded, however, only few of them are tested in a real-time environment, where the energy saving is achieved by compromising the systems’ reliability. Therefore, energy-efficient resource utilization without compromising the system’s reliability is still a challenge. In this research, a novel architecture, “Sleep Alert”, is proposed that not only avoids the excessive energy utilization but also improves the system reliability by using Resource Manager (RM) concept. In contrary to traditional approaches, Primary and Secondary Resource Managers i.e. RM_P and RM_S respectively are used to avoid the single point of failure. The proposed architecture is tested on a network where active users were accessing the distributed virtual storage and other applications deployed on the desktop machines, those are connected with each other through a peer-to-peer network. Experimental results show that the solution can save considerable amount of energy while making sure that reliability is not compromised. This solution is useful for small enterprise networks, where saving energy is a big challenge besides reliability.