David L. Kaminsky

Towards Energy Efficient Change Management in a Cloud Computing Environment

The continuously increasing cost of managing IT systems has led many companies to outsource their commercial services to external hosting centers. Cloud computing has emerged as one of the enabling technologies that allow such external hosting efficiently. Like any IT environment, a Cloud Computing environment requires high level of maintenance to be able to provide services to its customers. Replacing defective items (hardware/software), applying security patches, or upgrading firmware are just a few examples of the typical maintenance procedures needed in such environments. While taking resources down for maintenance, applying efficient change management techniques is a key factor to the success of the cloud. As energy has become a precious resource, research has been conducted towards devising protocols that minimize energy consumption in IT systems. In this paper, we propose a pro-active energy efficient technique for change management in cloud computing environments. We formulate the management problem into an optimization problem that aims at minimizing the total energy consumption of the cloud. Our proposed approach is pro-active in the sense that it takes prior SLA (Service Level Agreement) requests into account while determining time slots in which changes should take place.

Scheduling-capable autonomic manager for policy-based IT change management system

Managing large IT environments consisting of thousands of computers, routers, switches, and printers from different vendors is expensive and labor intensive. A typical piece of equipment goes through several planned and unplanned software and hardware upgrades. Maintaining and upgrading with minimal disruption and administrative support is a challenging task. One problem faced by IT administrators, in this change management process, is to arrive at a schedule for applying one or more change requests to the IT infrastructure. In this paper, the focus is on the problem of scheduling the change requests in the presence of organizational policies governing the use, access and availability of the IT infrastructure, we provide two approaches to scheduling and describe an implementation of a scheduler which shows the feasibility of our approach. The implementation is integrated with an autonomic manager described in earlier papers [1].

Scheduling-Capable Autonomic Manager for Policy Based IT Change Management System

Managing large IT environments consisting of thousands of computers, routers, switches, and printers from different vendors is expensive and labor intensive. A typical piece of equipment goes through several planned and unplanned software and hardware upgrades. Maintaining and upgrading with minimal disruption and administrative support is a challenging task. One problem faced by IT administrators, in this change management process, is to arrive at a schedule for applying one or more change requests to the IT infrastructure. In this paper, the focus is on the problem of scheduling the change requests in the presence of organizational policies governing the use, access and availability of the IT infrastructure, we provide two approaches to scheduling and describe an implementation of a scheduler which shows the feasibility of our approach. The implementation is integrated with an autonomic manager described in earlier papers [1].

Policy-Based Automation in the Autonomic Data Center

The autonomic data center enables enterprises to respond to pressures of cost, complexity and compliance for the information technology infrastructure that supports their business operations. A data center that uses IT service management to deliver business services offers an environment for incorporating autonomic behavior and capabilities. These autonomic characteristics can address enterprise pressures by achieving a more fully integrated data center that combines self-managing capabilities and leverages knowledge from operational activities to automate and integrate processes, tasks and resources. This paper addresses solutions for one aspect of such an autonomic data center, namely policy-based automation. In this abbreviated paper synopsis, we describe the use of policy and standards to enhance integration and automation.

A comparative study of specification models for autonomic access control of digital rights

One of the goals of Digital Rights Management Systems is the provision of a flexible access rights management system to specify and enforce digital rights. Policy-based access control is an important feature of flexible access management systems as it facilitates changes in access control with minimum or no changes to the system it protects. Two prominent policy based access specification models (and languages) are the Policy Core Information Model (PCIM) and the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML). In this paper we analyze and compare the two specification models for their suitability in building access rights for Digital Rights Management Systems.