Consolidated cluster systems for data centers in the cloud age: a survey and analysis

摘要

In the cloud age, heterogeneous application modes on large-scale infrastructures bring about the challenges on resource utilization and manageability to data centers. Many resource and runtime management systems are developed or evolved to address these challenges and relevant problems from different perspectives. This paper tries to identify the main motivations, key concerns, common features, and representative solutions of such systems through a survey and analysis. A typical kind of these systems is generalized as the consolidated cluster system, whose design goal is identified as reducing the overall costs under the quality of service premise. A survey on this kind of systems is given, and the critical issues concerned by such systems are summarized as resource consolidation and runtime coordination. These two issues are analyzed and classified according to the design styles and external characteristics abstracted from the surveyed work. Five representative consolidated cluster systems from both academia and industry are illustrated and compared in detail based on the analysis and classifications. We hope this survey and analysis to be conducive to both design implementation and technology selection of this kind of systems, in response to the constantly emerging challenges on infrastructure and application management in data centers.