The invention relates to the field of creating a more efficient colocation data center. More specifically, the invention relates to a method, system, and computer program product for placing corporate software applications and their associated data efficiently into computing nodes of a data center.
Organizations are increasingly relying on their computing applications to support customer interactions and to manage inter and intra organizational workflows. As application features, workloads, and infrastructure technology rapidly evolve and change, the management of these applications and their supporting infrastructure becomes a huge challenge for these organizations. Many organizations have dealt with this challenge by outsourcing the hosting of critical applications to data centers.
In addition, the problem of growing data storage needs in enterprise business applications creates a situation where the movement of data is prohibitive. Therefore, optimal hosting of critical applications for an organization need to place these applications and their data, which cannot be moved, optimally into computational facilities.
A colocation data center is a type of data center where organizations can rent equipment space and bandwidth. Colocation facilities provide power, space, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other organizations and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network providers with minimum cost and complexity. Colocation data centers also offer redundant systems for all these features to mitigate problems when each inevitably fails.
There are many models for collocating applications into data centers. However, it is desired to have more efficient colocation data centers and to give management the ability to run “what if” scenarios concerning the various configurations of components of the data centers.