Guillaume Belrose

An integrated approach to resource pool management: Policies, efficiency and quality metrics

The consolidation of multiple servers and their workloads aims to minimize the number of servers needed thereby enabling the efficient use of server and power resources. At the same time, applications participating in consolidation scenarios often have specific quality of service requirements that need to be supported. To evaluate which workloads can be consolidated to which servers we employ a trace-based approach that determines a near optimal workload placement that provides specific qualities of service. However, the chosen workload placement is based on past demands that may not perfectly predict future demands. To further improve efficiency and application quality of service we apply the trace-based technique repeatedly, as a workload placement controller. We integrate the workload placement controller with a reactive controller that observes current behavior to i) migrate workloads off of overloaded servers and ii) free and shut down lightly-loaded servers. To evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, we developed a new host load emulation environment that simulates different management policies in a time effective manner. A case study involving three months of data for 138 SAP applications compares our integrated controller approach with the use of each controller separately. The study considers trade-offs between i) required capacity and power usage, ii) resource access quality of service for CPU and memory resources, and iii) the number of migrations. We consider two typical enterprise environments: blade and server based resource pool infrastructures. The results show that the integrated controller approach outperforms the use of either controller separately for the enterprise application workloads in our study. We show the influence of the blade and server pool infrastructures on the effectiveness of the management policies.

Content-Centered Collaboration Spaces in the Cloud

Emphasizing communication, collaborative work, and community, the authors envision a cloud-based platform that inverts the traditional application-content relationship by placing content rather than applications at the center, enabling users to rapidly build customized solutions around their content items. The future of collaboration will focus on building and sustaining communities around content, tasks, and ideas. Hosted entities known as content spaces will support ecosystems of users and developers around this content. To make their case, the authors review the dominant trends in computing that motivate the exploration of new approaches for content-centered collaboration and discuss ways to address certain core problems for users and organizations.

Business-driven IT for SAP The Model Information Flow

Enterprises rely on efficient and flexible IT services. While complexity of services is increasing, personnel to provide and manage services will remain limited. At the same time, IT environments are becoming more dynamic, from the business side as well as from the infrastructure side. The ability to incorporate change faster, more efficiently and reliably has become a measure of quality of enterprise IT organizations. IT responds to these challenges by decoupling functions into services and by improving the linkages between business processes and the supporting IT systems. Service-oriented architecture has become the accepted pattern for modern enterprise IT. This paper presents the model information flow. It is part of a collaboration between HP Labs and SAP Research. The goal of the collaboration is to explore new approaches of model-driven planning, design and management of enterprise applications in a shared and virtualized IT infrastructure. The goal is to substantially improve the linkage between the business and the IT layer and die ability to manage and accommodate change more efficiently and in a largely automated manner.