Managing the End-to_end Lifecycle of Global Service Policies

Enterprise business services are often deployed over a complex environment, managed by multiple service-management products. For instance, a business service may be configured as a three-tier environment with different services that run on different resource domains and span one or more tiers. For managing such a configuration, a workload manager handles the prioritization and routing of requests according to performance objectives, and a business resiliency manager handles the pool of backup nodes and automates recovery according to availability and recovery objectives. Additionally, a resource arbiter makes decisions on allocation of resources across tiers and domains in order to meet the multiple service objectives. In such an environment, the runtime policies used by the various management products have to reflect the enterprise business objective policies, henceforth called Global Service Policies. We address two major requirements of the lifecycle management of global policies. First is the need for automated dissemination of global policies, which most often is performed manually by administrators. Second is the need for an arbitration framework supporting multiple models of resource arbitration in order to accommodate the evolution of business value models specified in global policies (e.g., importance-based differentiated services model, revenue maximization, etc.). We present a framework that addresses these two requirements, with policy dissemination based on matching global policy content with objective manager capabilities and with automated configuration of arbitration methods based on the current set of enterprise policies. The proposal is prototyped and integrated with several IBM service-management products.

By: Daniela Rosu; Asit Dan

Published in: RC23661 in 2005

LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:

This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.

rc23661.pdf

Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .