Today’s information technology (IT) departments are besieged with uncertainty. New applications are deployed, but their resource demands are unknown. Businesses offer promotional discounts, but the volume of customer responses is uncertain. Traditionally, these situations have been addressed by over-provisioning IT
resources and/or manual intervention to adjust for resource imbalances. Unfortunately, both approaches are undesirable. The first is costly in terms of equipment, licenses, electricity, etc.; the second requires expert operators who are in short supply and costly as well. This paper discusses an approach we have developed to react rapidly to workload surges so as to preserve service level objectives in a cost effective way.
By: Edwin R. Lassettre, Joseph L Hellerstein, Maheswaran Surendra, David W. Coleman, Yixin Diao, Steven E. Froehlich, Lawrence S. Hsiung, Todd W. Mummert, Mukund Raghavachari, Geoffrey K. Parker, Lance Russell, Veronica P. Tseng, Noshir C. Wadia, Peng Ye
Published in: RC22743 in 2003
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