Policy-Based Management for Dynamic Surge Protection

Policies are increasingly being used to manage complex systems. This paper presents our work on policy enablement of a dynamic surge protection system, which predicts the traffic changes in an IT environment and then balances an application’s resources based on a set of pre-defined policies. We aggregate the controller settings of the system into classes of service that can be more intuitively determined through administrative policies. The detailed settings of the elements of each class are defined and maintained by the use of a policy management tool. The controller automatically allocates or de-allocates application server resources in order to satisfy time varying workloads based on the input service level objectives. This not only externalizes the controller parameter settings but also allows the modification of the policies to change the behavior and strategy of the dynamic surge protection system without recoding the controller. As a result, the administrator’s tasks can be dramatically simplified, as the system adapts to changing environments.

By: Seraphin Calo, Steven Froehlich, Maheswaran Surendra, Dinesh Verma, Xiping Wang

Published in: RC23125 in 2004

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