Business Scenarios for Hierarchical Workload Management in Data Centers

Increasing the efficiency of workload management in datacenters is essential to achieve several business and technicalgoals, such as reduction of costs, energy consumption andcarbon emissions. Many solutions are available for workloadmanagement in a single data center, but there is still muchspace for the development of frameworks that are able tomanage the workload in a distributed scenario, with multiplesites and data centers. In this paper, we present the mainbenefits of hierarchical solutions, in which the problem is decomposedinto two layers, a lower layer that focuses on theworkload management within each single data center, and anupper layer that orchestrates the management of the workloadon a multi-site environment. We focus on the main advantagesof hierarchical approaches, i.e., autonomous management,scalability and modularity, and illustrate how andto which extent these advantages can be exploited in someemerging business scenarios, i.e., geographical data centers,software data centers and Hybrid Cloud.