High availability and efficient energy consumption for cloud computing service with grid infrastructure

The main services in cloud computing are SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and laaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Among these services, server virtualization falls into laaS which is a service for lowering server maintenance costs. Generally, the primary aim of server virtualization has been to improve system performance by replacing multiple servers with a single server with better performance. But it carries the problem of increased cost, needed for the installation of new servers for server virtualization. In this paper, grid infrastructure is used for server virtualization in which existing servers are used rather than bringing in new servers. Server virtualization service is provided using scheduling algorithms for distributed servers or resources in grid computing. To overcome potential performance limitations that come from using existing servers, mathematical models of Meta and Sleep Servers under the grid infrastructure environment are used to provide server virtualization service with high availability. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.