International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976-6367(Print),

ISSN 0976 - 6375(Online), Volume 5, Issue 7, July (2014), pp. 62-66 IAEME
62











CAPACITY MANAGEMENT ON CLOUD


Twisha, Amit Kr. Gautam, Jayant Sharma


1, 2
Assistant Professor, Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi, India
3
Assistant Professor, University of Delhi, India



ABSTRACT

Cloud Computing allows users to modify number of resources in real time thus focusing on
computing as a utility that can be access over the Internet. We saw various phases starting from
Centralized Bulky systems to Distributed Networks and now the emergence of Cloud Computing
which is based on Centralized Systems with Internet as the access. Here the vendor i.e. the owner of
Cloud is authenticated to provide services to user as per his demand. These Clouds are location-
independent and have a flexible pricing model for the user. But for efficient use of these services,
these should be properly managed using Capacity Management as a tool. Cloud Computing is only
advantageous if Cloud Services are efficiently used.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Capacity Management, Pay-as-you-go, Capacity Planning and Virtual
Cloud.

I. INTRODUCTION

Cloud Computing provides resources via internet, thus appearing to user as if the Cloud has
infinite capacity and pay as per the user demands. It mainly aims at the feature of Shared
Infrastructure, On-Demand-Service and Pay-As-You-Go. The advantages of Cloud Computing
are:

Doing-more-With-Less, this is with regard to infrastructure.
User can use the service without knowing the underlying technology
Enabling customer to use the resources as per need
Pay-for-What-you-use

Deployment models in cloud computing are Private Model; Public Model; Hybrid Model

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ISSN 0976 6367(Print)
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Volume 5, Issue 7, July (2014), pp. 62-66
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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976-6367(Print),
ISSN 0976 - 6375(Online), Volume 5, Issue 7, July (2014), pp. 62-66 IAEME
63

II. ECONOMICS

Cloud Computing is highly expensive if proper monitoring is not adapted. As per the
economic statistics available Cloud Computing is almost 2.83 times expensive as compared to in-
house server without incorporating capacity management.
Lets compare an actual cost of a cloud server as compared to the equivalent in-house
infrastructure running within an enterprise. As an example of extra-large server on EC2 cloud
having 15GB of memory and 8 compute units. It costs $0.68 per CPU-hour to the customer.
Purchasing an equivalent server for in-house deployment costs $9500(approx). This price if for an
x86 server with 3 quad-core CPUs i.e. 12 processing cores, 12GB memory and 300GB disk. If we
run this in-house server for 3years i.e. 26260 hrs (approx), then the cost per hour will be $0.36/hr
over 3years. This cost compared to the cost of cloud server ($0.68 /hr), which is 2.83 times the cost
of an in-house server. Even if we discount the fact that in-house server has 12 cores compared to
EC2 servers 8 cores, the cloud server costs 1.88 times expensive.
As per the Table 1 cloud server is more expensive than an equivalent in-house server. But
now we consider the fact that most servers are heavily underutilizes, say about 40 percent, whereas
cloud server has much more utilization, say 80 percent. Factoring this in, the Cost/effective-hour
comes out to be $0.90 (i.e. cost /hr divided by the efficiency), whereas the same for a server
deployed in cloud comes out to be $0.85. Than adding the management cost, power & cooling cost,
etc in In-house server and the Management Cost in Cloud server, we can conclude that In-house
Server is 1.5 times (approx.) expensive than the cloud server. But this benefit can only be achieved if
we incorporate proper Capacity Management & Monitoring in the cloud server.

Table 1: Economics of Servers
In-House server Cloud Server
Purchase Cost $9,600

Cost/hr(over 3yrs) $0.36 $0.68
Price(Cloud/In-
House)
$1.88

Price of core-hr $0.03 (0.36/12) $0.09
Price 2.83 times expensive
Efficiency 40% 80%
Cost/Effective-hr $0.90 $0.85
Power & cooling $0.36

Management Cost $0.10 $0.01
Total Cost/Effective-
hr
$1.36 $0.86
CostRatio(In-
house/Cloud)
1.58 times expensive

III. PRACTICAL ISSUES

Amazon is the first cloud provider and it faced the following issues:

1. Complexity of the application suite
2. Peaks and throughs of seasonal retail business necessities were there. So, regular load
monitoring and provisioning additional capacity on demand was required.

International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976-6367(Print),
ISSN 0976 - 6375(Online), Volume 5, Issue 7, July (2014), pp. 62-66 IAEME
64

Using a public cloud offering astrict the need to plan ahead for peak load and converts fixed
costs into variable costs that change with actual usage, thereby eliminating wastage. In contrast,
provisioning for peak capacity is a necessity within private data centers. Without adequate scale
there is limited opportunity to amortize capacity across different applications.

IV. SOLUTION: CAPACITY MANAGEMENT

Vendors can address clients challenges by:

Prioritizing workloads
Maximizing business return by identifying well suited applications
Addressing problematic workloads
Identifying potential problems & addressing them before migration
Important driving force for cloud economics is the way hardware capacity is planned for and
purchased

Using a public cloud offering therefore obligates the need to plan ahead for peak load and
converts fixed costs into variable costs that change with actual usage, thereby eliminating wastage.
Thus this can be achieved by Capacity Management. Capacity Management is concerned with the
following:

1. Monitoring the performance, throughput and load on the system.
2. Analyzing the performance of the system.
3. Tuning the performance of the system as the existing requirements
4. Future planning/ Prediction as per the demands
5. Capacity Planning

Time and Capacity are the two potential constraints in Capacity Management. Considering
Cloud Computing, both these are major constraints to be taken care of.

40.00%
30.00% 20.00%
10.00%
10.00%
30.00%
Cloud Server
User A
User B
User C
User D


For an example, suppose we have a cloud server which is used by 5 users (as shown below).

We have the free space of 30%, but now the user B and user D leaves the space they have. So,
the space has to be lent out to other customers for cost profit. For this forecasting of the amount of
data which will be available in future will be predicted by the Capacity Management team. It will
monitor the present load on the system and will plan for future. If this analysis and planning is not
there, then the cloud server will have the following view:
International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976-6367(Print),
ISSN 0976 - 6375(Online), Volume 5, Issue 7, July (2014), pp. 62-66 IAEME
65

40.00%
20.00%
10.00%
70.00%
Cloud Server
User A
User C
User E
Free Space

Figure: Cloud Distribution

As per the chart, 70% of the space is free, thus major part of the server is wasted. It is often
argued that using virtualization and automatic provisioning technologies in-house it should be
possible to create a virtual cloud where these inefficiencies would disappear and benefits of cloud
computing could be achieved on premises. But if there is insufficient planning then shifting to cloud
server is a total waste, as can be seen in the example above.

V. TECHNIQUE USED

Let x1, x2, x3 xn be the respective demands of applications 1 to n. Also let X be the
summation of demands of all running applications, i.e.

X (t1) = x1 + x2 + x + +xn at a particular time t1

& the maximum of X() be Xmax ,i.e.

Xmax = max(X(t(x)) over time t

Variation in X and Xmax is affected by running of various applications. So if the difference
between X and Xmax is not much at maximum number of time then there is no use of providing
dynamic availability of the demands by various applications, so in this case Xmax can be provided
by the cloud server.


Figure: Cloud Over-Provisioning: Best Case

On the other hand if there is major difference between X and Xmax at maximum number of
times then the demand should be fulfilled dynamically which should be the actual demand at that
time with summation of a fixed variable (i.e. time taken to provide the demand) and the rate of
change of X.

International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976-6367(Print),
ISSN 0976 - 6375(Online), Volume 5, Issue 7, July (2014), pp. 62-66 IAEME
66


Figure: Cloud Over-Provisioning: Worst Case

So, the total virtual capacity that should be provided by the cloud service provider should be:

VC(t) =X(t) + * dX/dt, where is the provisional delay

VI. CONCLUSION

When dealing with a set of resources in cloud, capacity management can be metaphorically
viewed as making sure you have a big enough bucket to hold all of the water the business needs to
slake its thirst. There are boundaries on this pool of resources. Capacity management under this
"bucket" approach tends to center on predicting peak usage needs and ensuring that in-house data
centers can meet those demands.

REFERENCES

[1] Chris Molloy, Member, IBM Academy of Technology, Capacity Management for Cloud
Computing, 2009 IBM Corporation.
[2] Keith Jeffery [ERCIM], Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz [SAP Research], The Future Of Cloud
Computing, Expert Group Report, European Commision Information Society & Media.
[3] Gautam Shroff, Enterprise cloud computing: Technology, architeture, applications,
India/Cambridge University press/2011.
[4] Saurabh Kumar, Cloud Computing, 2nd Ed., New Delhi/Wiley India (P) Ltd/2012.
[5] Ron Potter, Capacity Management Ensures Success for Enterprise Cloud Consumers,
www.techquest.com.
[6] Daniel A. Menasce & Paul Ngo, Understanding Cloud Computing: Experimentation and
Capacity Planning, Proc. 2009 Computer Measurement Group Conf, Dallax, TX, Dec. 7-11,
2009.
[7] Davis Linthicum, How Capacity Management changes in the Cloud, InfoWorld.com.
[8] Amazon Web Services. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud homepage.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2, November 2008.
[9] Chappel D. Microsoft Azure homepage. Introducing the Azure Services Platform [Internet].
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/whatisazure.mspx, October 2008.
[10] Microsoft Azure homepage. http://www.microsoft.com/azure, 2008.
[11] Gurudatt Kulkarni, Jayant Gambhir and Amruta Dongare, Security in Cloud Computing,
International Journal of Computer Engineering & Technology (IJCET), Volume 3, Issue 1,
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