The outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) operations is a common phenomenon in the industry, and has spurred a significant growth in the number of companies that provide hosting support for different IT operations. The current state of the art is for an IT service provider to negotiate a detailed system configuration with the enterprise customer based upon explicit resource requirements. The negotiation and provisioning of such system configurations are typically time-consuming, manual processes. We present an architecture and algorithms by which the service provider can negotiate the service provisioning in terms of performance metrics, rather than on the basis of resource configuration. Furthermore, we describe the different techniques that can be used to reduce the amount of time required for making an outsourced service operational.
By: Dinesh Verma, Seraphin B. Calo
Published in: RC22501 in 2002
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