International Business Machines Corporation

Cisco Technology, Inc.

Jean-Marc Berthaud

Pascal Chauffour

Joel D Dalsky

Jean-Claude Dispensa

Valerie Mahe

Shih-Chung Fang

Lee Tsiao

Claude R Galand

Christopher Ward

Rong Nickle Chang

Melissa J Buco

Laura Zaihua Luan

Pierre-Andre Foriel

Laurent Nicolas

Stephane Charles Lebrun

Jean-Francois Fauh

Charles Manghini

Stephane Lengelle

Claude Basso

Craig William Fellenstein

Aline Fichou

Jean-Marie L Munier

Victor Spagnol

Eric LeBrun

Alain Albert Dorel

Michel Susini

Patrick Gayrard

Marcus Enger

Adrian R Hall

Jean-Pierre Rigaud

Fred Trucco

A method and system for managing at least one service level of a service provided by a service provider to a customer of the service provider under a service level agreement. The service level agreement is a contract between the service provider and the customer. Measurement data and at least one adjudication element associated with a service level of the at least one service level are adjudicated in accordance with the at least one adjudication element such that the adjudication generates a respective adjudicated data point for each data point of the measurement data. The measurement data includes at least one data point measured on a respective resource that provides the service. A modification history chain is generated by: initially establishing the modification history chain as being empty; and adding an identification of each adjudicated element applied to each data point of the measurement data to the modification history chain.

Managing service levels provided by service providers

A method and system for managing at least one service level of a service provided by a service provider to a customer of the service provider under a service level agreement. The service level agreement is a contract between the service provider and the customer. Measurement data and at least one adjudication element associated with a service level of the at least one service level are retrieved in an electronic format. The measurement data and the at least one adjudication element are stored in a datastore. The measurement data includes at least one data point measured on a respective resource that provides the service. The retrieved measurement data are adjudicated for the service level in accordance with the at least one adjudication element such that the adjudication generates a respective adjudicated data point for each data point of the measurement data.

An identity management method and system is disclosed. The method includes identity context management (ICM) clients monitoring access to Internet resources using dedicated Virtual Machines (VM). An ICM server monitors associations between Internet resource identifiers (IDs) and the Internet resources accessed by the VMs. The VMs register context for the ICM clients with the ICM server. An ICM client enables access to Internet resources and presentation of Webpages and Internet contents associated with the Internet resources within the associated Virtual Machine context.

Identity management

Identity management method and system

A method and system for managing a service level of a service provided by a service provider to a customer under a service level agreement. The actual measurement data is adjudicated to correct the measurement data in accordance with at least one adjudication element that provides information relating to how to correct the measurement data. The adjudicated measurement data is transformed into operational data by being reorganized into one or more groups of data. The operational data is evaluated by applying a formula to the operational data, resulting in the operational data being configured for being subsequently qualified. The operational data is qualified by comparing the evaluated operational data with specified service level targets for at least one service level period and identifying operational data points meeting and/or not meeting the specified service level targets.

Method and system for managing service levels provided by service providers

A method of synchronizing firewalls in a communication system comprising a server farm wherein any user connected to the Internet can access customer servers, and at least two firewalls using a Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to set up as primary interface firewall the firewall which owns the primary interface of the VRRP group of interfaces to at least one customer server. The method includes initializing, in a secondary interface firewall, a synchronization message exchange with the primary firewall after receiving a packet for a connection having a state which is incompatible with the received packet or after the standard firewall processing of a packet corresponding to a new connection, and registering in a common connection table the state of any connection if the connection is new or if the connection state has changed.

Method of synchronizing firewalls in a communication system based upon a server farm

The invention provides a system and method for providing a high availability application at low cost for a wide range of solution architectures. A user runs a simplistic web-based wizard to install the high availability application. Then, a user designs the high availability application's logic for an individual process or process-group using a finite state table. Next, a standard UNIX init process spawner subsystem is extended to implement the high availability application as a property of a process. Finally, the logic from the finite state table is used to make each process or process-group highly available.

Method and system for improving the availability of software processes utilizing configurable finite state tables

A method and system for managing a service level of a service provided by a service provider to a customer under a service level agreement. The measurement data is transformed into operational data. The operational data is evaluated through use of a formula represented as a tree, resulting in the evaluated operational data populating the nodes of the tree as the tree is traversed from the root node to leaf nodes. The evaluated operational data at the nodes includes a top result and intermediate results. The top result is qualified by being compared with specified service level targets for at least one service level period during which the service has been performed. The intermediate results are qualified by being compared with generated new service level targets.

Qualifying means in method and system for managing service levels provided by service providers

A method of preserving symmetrical routing in a communication system comprising a server farm connected to the Internet through an Internet access router. The server farm includes at least two customer cabinets with at least a WEB server and at least two firewalls. The firewalls use a Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to set up one firewall as being the primary firewall. The method includes checking in each firewall whether there is a change of the VRRP state from primary to secondary or reciprocally. Such a change indicates that a link between the primary firewall and one of the customer cabinets has failed. The link is disabled from the network to the firewall the state of which has changed from primary to secondary or the link is enabled from the Internet network to the firewall the state of which has changed from secondary to primary.

Preserving symmetrical routing in a communication system based upon a server farm

Method of preserving symmetrical routing in a communication system based upon a server farm

A security system for a communication system that includes an IP network and groups of servers in a farm, wherein each group is associated with a customer. A user connected to the network can access information provided by a customer from a server within the group of servers associated with this customer through a dispatching device. The security system comprises setting means in each of the switches which are located between the dispatching device and the customer servers for setting a field of bits in the IP header of potentially irregular packets transmitted from a customer server and the dispatching device, means in the dispatching device for identifying any packet wherein the field of bits has been set to the predefined value, and means for deleting or logging the potentially irregular packet when the destination of the packet is not the dispatching device.

Security system for preventing unauthorized packet transmission between customer servers in a server farm

A method of preserving symmetrical routing in a communication system comprising a server farm connected to the Internet by an Internet access router IAR. The server farm includes at least two customer cabinets each having a WEB server, and at least two firewalls. The firewalls use Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to set up a primary firewall that supports communication between a customer server and an Internet user. The IAR selects the firewall to be used as being the firewall corresponding to the interface having the lowest weight in a routing table. The cost assigned to each interface associated with a firewall is automatically generated, at the initial time, according to the priority assigned by the VRRP protocol to said interface associated with said firewall.

A method and system for managing a service level of a service provided by a service provider to a customer under a service level agreement. The measurement data is adjudicated to correct the measurement data in accordance with at least one adjudication element that identifies a rule specifying how to correct the measurement data. The adjudicated measurement data is transformed into operational data by merging the adjudicated measurement data using a logic specified in the service level agreement. The operational data is evaluated by applying a formula to the operational data, resulting in the operational data being configured for being subsequently qualified. The operational data is qualified by comparing the evaluated operational data with specified service level targets for at least one service level period and identifying operational data points meeting and/or not meeting the specified service level targets.

Adjudication means in method and system for managing service levels provided by service providers

A method of upgrading a program, used in a data processing device having a permanent memory, from a version n to a version n&plus;1, wherein, at any time, both the recent version and the previous version of the program are stored in a first and a second location of the memory. Each one of version n and version n&plus;1 of the program is using configuration data of format n and format n&plus;1, respectively, when it is used as a current version. The configuration data of format n are automatically stored into the memory when version n&plus;1 of the program is stored into the second location of memory.

Method of upgrading a program using associated configuration data

A method for automatically determining whether power consumption devices can be powered up in a power consuming system having multiple power consumption devices to be powered up by one or several voltages among a set of voltages V , V . . . Vm. The set of voltages are provided by multiple power supplies, wherein each power supply provides at least one voltage. The power consuming system also includes a control point for controlling the power supplied to the power consumption devices. The method includes determining a set of linear inequations linking each variable P , P . . . P representing the power being consumed for each voltage, or combinations of several variables, to predetermined power limits PVC. Next, the real power value (P) requested for each voltage in order to power up each one of the first plurality of power consumption devices is determined. Subsequently, each real power value is divided by the number of power supplies (p) providing power for the associated voltage in order to determine the components of a power consumption vector (PC) for each power supply. Next, the variables P , P . . . P are replaced in the inequations by the corresponding components of the power consumption vector for each power supply (PC) in order to obtain a requested power value for each inequation. The requested power value is then compared to the predetermined power limits (PVC). The requested power value is then compared to the predetermined power limits (PVC) and the control point determines that a new power supply is requested if at least one of the requested power values is greater than the predetermined power limits.

Growing community of inventors

Villeneuve Loubet, France

Jean-Marc Berthaud