Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Strategies for lowering overall energy con-
sumption include a broad range of activities.
Microsoft IT has been engaged in projects,
which are targeted data center, various layers of
the applications and specific server workloads.
Consolidation efforts include Right Sizing, Stor-
age Utility, Compute Utility, File Server Utility
and the SQL Server consolidation initiative to
ensure energy efficiency, and elimination of un-
necessary hardware. In addition to environmental
sustainability benefits, SQL Server consolidation
presents clear business benefits, such as:
many companies to consider outsourcing their
data centers to external providers offering their
services in grids and clouds. The first category
is focused on achieving optimized and flexible
processes and lower costs by improving resource
utilization. At the core of this category are innova-
tions facilitating:
•
Better utilization of computing power and
data storage,
•
On-demand provision of additional com-
puting power and storage in order to re-
spond to peaks in consumption,
•
Reduction of operating and capital
expenses,
•
Aggregation of heterogeneous data sourc-
es in virtual data-stores.
•
Reduction in data center space,
•
Provision of business continuity, scalabil-
ity and availability,
The second category focuses on collaboration
and resource sharing. At the core of this category
are innovations improving:
•
Provision of a standardized server build
library.
•
The agility of businesses and their abil-
ity to respond to business opportunity by
enabling the swift establishment of multi-
enterprise collaborations,
The SQL Server Utility is oriented to eliminate
manual steps needed to build an application en-
vironment. This can be achieved by establishing
Hyper-V guests, which are built with standard
software configuration, including the operating
system, SQL Server, tools and approved configu-
rations which can be provided for use in different
phases of the software development life cycle.
•
The execution of collaborative processes
spanning across-enterprise boundaries,
•
Provision and access to shared network-
hosted (cloud) services that facilitate
collaboration,
•
Seamless access to heterogeneous geo-
graphically distributed data sources
(Stanoevska-Slabeva & Wozniak, 2010).
Grid Computing
Grid computing has been an attempt to manage
the high number of computing nodes in distributed
data centers and to achieve better utilization of dis-
tributed and heterogeneous computing resources
in companies. Advances in virtualization technol-
ogy enable greater decoupling between physical
computing resources and software applications
and promise higher industry adoption of distrib-
uted computing concepts such as grid and cloud.
The continuous increase of maintenance costs and
demand for additional resources as well as for
Grid computing is basically deployed grid
middleware or the computing enabled by grid
middleware based on flexible, secure, coordinated
resource sharing among a dynamic collection
of individuals, institutions and resources. Grid
computing means that heterogeneous pools of
servers, storage systems and networks are pooled
together in a virtualized system that is exposed to
the user as a single computing entity. The main
functionalities of a grid middleware are:
