Business Scenarios for Hierarchical Workload Management in Data Centers

Increasing the efficiency of workload management in data centers is essential to achieve several business and technical goals, such as reduction of costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Many solutions are available for workload management in a single data center, but there is still much space for the development of frameworks that are able to manage the workload in a distributed scenario, with multiple sites and data centers. In this paper, we present the main benefits of hierarchical solutions, in which the problem is decomposed into two layers, a lower layer that focuses on the workload management within each single data center, and an upper layer that orchestrates the management of the workload on a multi-site environment. We focus on the main advantages of hierarchical approaches, i.e., autonomous management, scalability and modularity, and illustrate how and to which extent these advantages can be exploited in some emerging business scenarios, i.e., geographical data centers, software data centers and Hybrid Cloud.