Achieving Energy Efficiency by Optimal Resource Utilisation in Cloud Environment

Emergence of cloud computing has provided an efficient platform for distributed utility computing. But, the huge amount of energy consumed in cloud environment has raised many environmental concerns. To solve the issue of energy consumption in cloud environment, the design of energy efficient mechanism must start to play a major role. The paper addresses this issue by proposing Energy Manager which governs activities in cloud to attain optimal energy utilization. The Energy Manager takes into account resource utilization, CPU frequency, supply voltage and effect of all these on response time. In a novel way, it uses soft scaling as a precursor to Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) to enhance the effectiveness of DVFS in virtualized environment. It implements DVFS, Virtual Machine (VM) migration and consolidation, soft scaling, and power state switching techniques to achieve the objective.