Green IT

Elastra’s solutions for Green IT is an initiative to help enterprises create and maintain energy efficient data centers. In adopting the advanced planning and optimization technologies of the Elastra Cloud Server and by extending Elastra’s modeling languages, customers can explicitly optimize the distribution of applications in their data center to maximize energy efficiency.

Elastra accomplishes this through two technologies available in the product. The first technology is the ECML and EDML semantic modeling languages. ECML is a language used to describe an application (software, requirements, and policies) and EDML is used to describe the resources (virtual machines, storage, and network) available in a data center. These languages can be easily extended to enhance the definition of the applications and resources.

These modeling languages coupled with the Plan-Composer in the Elastra Cloud Server enables users to synthesize a plan for execution. The Plan-Composer analyzes the proposed application designs (expressed thru ECML) and data center resources (expressed thru EDML), comparing them against a library of actions and outcomes. It then generates a plan based on the energy efficiency policies of the organization that can be executed by the Cloud Server against a customer’s infrastructure.

Energy Efficient Modules in the Plan-Composer of Elastra Cloud Server

By extending ECML and EDML to integrate with existing power management systems and processes in the data center, Elastra can create extensible knowledge modules that allow the Plan-Composer to optimize and plan for energy efficiency. For instance, if resource A in a customer data center had a power cost of X and every other resource had a power cost of Y a knowledge module can be configured to provision the cheaper resource in terms of power cost. In addition to simple minimization algorithms the Plan-Composer can optimize for more sophisticated goals like PUE or DCiE. Since knowledge modules can be used in conjunction with each other the system can balance competing priorities to ensure that applications are still managed on systems that meet the requirements of the applications.

View the Green IT Presentation.