John Arthur Pershing

Oceano-SLA based management of a computing utility

Oceano is a prototype of a highly available, scaleable, and manageable infrastructure for an e-business computing utility. It enables multiple customers to be hosted on a collection of sequentially shared resources. The hosting environment is divided into secure domains, each supporting one customer. These domains are dynamic: the resources assigned to them may be augmented when the load increases and reduced when load dips. This dynamic resource allocation enables flexible service level agreements (SLAs) with customers in an environment where peak loads are an order of magnitude greater than the normal steady state.

Managing the configuration complexity of distributed applications in Internet data centers

In this article we examine the challenges faced by data center administrators when deploying and configuring Web applications. We discuss how the configuration dependencies of these Web applications cut across software stacks, network layers, and middleware container boundaries. We argue that the deployment and configuration process requires the combined expertise from multiple domains such as application, middleware, network, security, reliability, and performance. We review the model-based tools available today to manage the configuration complexity of these applications and introduce a new tool that extends the existing state of the art by automatically generating actionable distributed deployment models using model transformation techniques. The key idea behind this new tool is the principle of separation of concerns: developers capture the logical structure of the application in a model, best practices experts define deployment model transformation rules, deployers specify the required deployment patterns, and an operator provides a model describing the data center resources. The tool automatically finds solutions based on these four inputs and executes the deployment.

Using a utility computing framework to develop utility systems

In this paper we describe a utility computing framework, consisting of a component model, a methodology, and a set of tools and common services for building utility computing systems. This framework facilitates the creation of new utility computing systems by providing a set of common functions, as well as a set of standard interfaces for those components that are specialized. It also provides a methodology and tools to assemble and re-use resource provisioning and management functions used to support new services with possibly different requirements. We demonstrate the benefits of the framework by describing two sample systems: a life-science utility computing service designed and implemented using the framework, and an on-line gaming utility computing service designed in compliance with the framework.

A methodology for analyzing availability weak points in SOA deployment frameworks

The fundamental characteristics of SOA, loose coupling and on-demand integration, enable organizations to seek more flexibility and responsiveness from their business IT systems. However, this brings challenges to assure QoS, especially availability, which should be considered in an integrated way in an SOA environment. Traditionally, availability is measured for each IT resource, but within SOA environments, rather than being considered individually, availability should be analyzed from an end-to-end view from both business and IT perspectives. In this paper, to address the availability problem of SOA, we propose a methodology that analyzes availability weak points in SOA deployment frameworks, leveraging workflow definitions that specify availability requirements at business level. This methodology includes an effective way to calculate high availability enhancement recommendations for a given SOA deployment topology with near-minimum cost, while meeting the business-level availability requirements. A prototype has been implemented as an extension to IBMs SOA deployment framework. Its efficiency and performance are analyzed here.

Availability “weak point” analysis over an SOA deployment framework

Availability is one of the important factors to be considered for business-driven IT service management. This paper addresses the issue of analyzing what we call availability weak-points in an SOA deployment framework, leveraging workflow definitions to specify the high availability requirement at the business process level. In our weak-point analysis framework, we present an effective analysis methodology to calculate the optimal high availability solution with minimum cost, while meeting the business level availability requirements. We evaluate the weak-point analysis methodology, and show that our methodology can identify a near-optimal solution for availability enhancement over the SOA deployment framework.

Prospects for simplifying ITSM-based management through self-managing resources

Information technology service management (ITSM) codifies and supports the current best practices in the management and governance of existing IT infrastructures, including the computing infrastructure that underlies service delivery. Once ITSM tools have identified and structured current best practices, there is a significant opportunity to simplify those practices, and thereby ITSM in general, by introducing self-managing resources (SMRs). SMRs and related technologies allow increased delegation of existing ITSM tasks from humans to autonomic managers and the restructuring of ITSM activities through process modification and task replacement or elimination. In particular, the use of SMRs and virtualization can convert many activities that currently require multiple planning, validation, and approval tasks into routine activities that have a simpler task flow, in much the same way that modern file systems have transformed file-layout tasks that formerly required a skilled administrator into tasks that are handled entirely and transparently by the operating system. This paper briefly describes the general principles of SMRs, explores a number of potential impacts that this technology will have on ITSM processes, and illustrates these ideas with an analysis of how selected ITSM flows may be transformed.