Towards an interoperable energy efficient Cloud computing architecture - practice & experience

The energy consumption of Cloud computing continues to be an area of significant concern as data center growth continues to increase. This paper reports on an energy efficient interoperable Cloud architecture realized as a Cloud toolbox that focuses on reducing the energy consumption of Cloud applications holistically across all deployments models. The architecture supports energy efficiency at service construction, deployment, and operation and interoperability through the use of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. We discuss our practical experience during implementation and present an initial performance evaluation of the architecture. The results show that the implementing Cloud provider interoperability is feasible and incurs minimal performance overhead during application deployment in comparison to the time taken to instantiate Virtual Machines.