The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that offers great opportunities that is designed to improve the quality of consumers' lives, and also to improve economic indicators and productivity of enterprises, and more efficient use of resources. IoT system refers to the use of interconnected devices and distributed subsystems to leverage data gathered by sensors and actuators in some sort of environment and to take a proper decision on a high level. In this chapter, the authors propose an approach to Microcloud-based IoT infrastructure management to provide the desired quality of IT services with rational use of IT resources. Efficiency of IT infrastructure management can be estimated by the quality of services and the management costs. The task of operational service quality management is to maintain a given level of service quality with the use of minimum IT resources amount in IoT environment. Then, the maximum efficiency can be achieved by selecting such control when actual level of service corresponds to the coordinated with business unit and can be achieved by minimal costs. The proposed approach allows the efficient use of resources for IT services provision in IoT ecosystem through the implementation of service level coordination, resource planning and service level management processes in an integrated IT infrastructure management system based on hyperconvergence and software-defined principles. The main goals of this chapter are to investigate the state of art of the IoT applications resource demands in the context of datacenter architecture deployment and to propose Microcloud-based IoT infrastructure resource control method.
TopBackground
The IoT facilitates new possibilities in many industries and creates additional load on the datacenter due to the additional number of devices being placed into the network and enormous increasing demand of data exchange and processing. IoT turns out to be much more complex than just deploying new applications, connecting more computers, mobile devices and sensors to the network.
Given the current challenges, which are created by the IoT spreading, enterprises will need to take into account relevant technology deployments and implement internal change management to be ready to the IoT load.
The Internet of Things is defined by IoT European Research Cluster (IERC) as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self-configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network (Sundmaeker, Guillemin, Friess, & Woelfflé, 2010).
Many emergent IoT applications will be delivered on-demand through a cloud environment. Thereby, the need to employ new adequate datacenter technologies arises. They would offer high productivity, reliability and elasticity in a scalable fashion.
A significant scientific effort in the field of IoT is devoted to the Smart Environments class systems, such as the Smart Home, Smart City, Smart Office, Smart Energy & Fuel, Smart Health, environment monitoring and others. IoT evolution in this direction is very intense (Al-Fuqaha, Guizani, Mohammadi, Aledhari, & Ayyash, 2015).
The most intensively developing ecosystem is Machine-to-Machine (M2M) which services process huge amounts of data obtained from sensors (Beecham Research, 2011). Data from sensors needs to be transferred to the respective applications in compliance with security policies and priorities. In this case, cloud IoT services use stored data to perform analysis for decision-making to improve business performance. By 2020, the number of IoT objects worldwide could reach 212 billion. And by 2022 the traffic M2M services could reach 45% of all traffic on the Internet (Gantz & Reinsel, 2012).
External impacts from IoT are creating new demands to the data center. By 2020, Gartner predicts that 25 billion devices will be connected to the Internet, creating greater external demand for storage and communication with the data center.