Shall I Use Heterogeneous Data Centers? – A Case Study on Video on Demand Systems Shi Feng∗, Hong Zhang∗ and Wenguang Cheny ∗ Department of Computer Science and Technology Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology Beijing, 100084, China Email: ffredfsh,
[email protected] y Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen Shenzhen, 518057, China Email:
[email protected] Abstract—Recent research work and industrial experience In this paper we perform a case study on VOD systems. show that heterogeneous data centers can be more cost- Previous work suggests power and cost efficiency of a plat- effective for some applications, especially those with intensive form should be determined by actually running the workload I/O operations. However, for a given application, it remains difficult to decide whether the application should be deployed on the platform [4], [5]. We conduct extensive experiments on homogeneous nodes or heterogeneous nodes. to find the optimized configuration for VOD systems. We use In this paper, we perform a case study on finding opti- Helix Server with Helix Producer in Windows, and choose mized configurations for Video on Demand(VOD) systems. We VLC+FFmpeg in Linux. We measure the power and cost examine two major modules in VOD systems, the streaming of platform combinations over three types of processors module and the transcoding module. In this study, we measure performance and power on different configurations by varying and three kinds of disks. Each VOD system contains two these factors: processor type, disk type, number of disks, modules. We explore the effectiveness of mapping distinct operating systems and module mapping modes.