International Business Machines Corporation

Lily Barkovic Mummert

Tamar Eilam

Sandra D Miller

Guerney D H Hunt

William G Pope

Gerd Breiter

John Arthur Pershing, Jr

Michael H Kalantar

Andrea Schmidt

Jutta Kreyss

Liana Liyow Fong

Nikolaos Anerousis

Giovanni Pacifici

Alexander V Konstantinou

Kaoutar El Maghraoui

Guerney Douglass Holloway Hunt

Elizabeth Ann Black-Ziegelbein

Susan Maureen Hanson

Alok Menghrajani

This invention provides for the hierarchical provisioning and management of a computing infrastructure which is used to provide computing services to the customers of the service provider that operates the infrastructure. Infrastructure resources can include those acquired from other service providers. The invention provides architecture for hierarchical management of computing infrastructures. It allows the dynamic provisioning and assignment of resources to computing environments. Customers can have multiple computing environments within their domain. The service provider shares its resources across multiple customer domains and arbitrates on the use of resources between and within domains. The invention enables resources to be dedicated to a specific customer domain or to a specific computing environment. Customers can specify acquisition and distribution policy which controls their use of resources within their domains.

Hierarchical resource management for a computing utility

Techniques for improving application server performance and availability are provided. In one aspect, a method of monitoring the health of one or more application servers comprises the following steps. One or more health classes are specified, each of the one or more health classes defining one or more health policies for the one or more application servers. At least one of the one or more health policies is monitored. Violations, if any, of the one or more health policies are detected.

Techniques for health monitoring and control of application servers

A system for provisioning service environments (SEs) and resources includes a component for creating and handling state change events and a parts catalog including descriptions of SEs, variable federated resources, aggregated, and basic resources. The system further includes a planner component for generating plans for construction and destruction of SEs and plans for creation, addition, removal and destruction of every aggregated resource to or from the SEs. The planner component has an interface to the parts catalog and an interface to a global dynamic free pool manager. The global dynamic free pool manager is configured for dynamically constructing and destructing dynamic free pool managers with their assigned dynamic free pools including dynamically changing their capacities.

System, method and computer program product for provisioning of resources and service environments

The present invention provides a system, method, and computer program product to accelerate provisioning by dynamically creating dynamic free pools (DFPs) of pre-provisioned resources that are provisioned in advance, and are ready and free for use. A DFP construct for a resource, and its associated dynamic free pool manager are generated dynamically from a formal description of an aggregated resource structure (e.g. in the form of an XML schema). The present invention also provides a system, method, and computer program product to improve the delivery time of SEs based on the DFP constructs. The methods are extended to deal with special conditions such as contention over resources, or critical delivery time.

A method, system, and computer program product are disclosed for automatically determining a valid ordering of provisioning operations, and their needed parameters, so that a provisioning system can configure a desired resource state. This is accomplished by formally describing the pre-conditions and effects of provisioning operations, the current state of managed resources and the desired final state. A planning algorithm is then used to determine the provisioning operations, a valid ordering and appropriate parameters to bring the system from the current state to the desired state.

Method, system, and product for identifying provisioning operations via planning methods

A system and method for evaluating workload units in a computer system whereby each workload unit is assigned an impact number representing the number of days that the expiration date of a computer system would be changed if the workload unit were to be added or removed from the system with all other workload units remaining the same. Each workload unit may be assigned a different number for each system in the environment. The inventive system and method simplify the task of combining multidimensional workload measures and incorporate the interaction with other workload units in the system by assessing the impact on both a donor and a recipient computer systems' expiration dates. Thus, the invention provides a more robust way to measure the effect of moving workload units between systems to result in a better allocation of work amongst computer systems in a processing environment.

System and method to improve service in a group of servers

The present invention is directed to provisioning and managing computing services in a computing utility system. It receives as an input an infrastructure independent description of a set of requirements on the new desired state of a computing service. It uses a knowledge plane to represent the infrastructure. The method generates a Concrete Model that describes a resource structure that refines the input and is implementable over the infrastructure. It then generates and possibly executes provisioning actions to create an identical resource structure on the infrastructure. The method can be used to create new computing services, to destroy existing computing services, to modify the resource combinations allocated to a computing service, or the configuration of these resources. Provisioning actions can be executed immediately, or saved and executed later, and possibly many times. Provisioning actions may be regenerated using the method whenever infrastructure characteristics, or the service requirements change.

Automatic provisioning of services based on a high level description and an infrastructure description

A method, system, and computer program for managing multi-tiered resource systems, such as Storage Area Networks (SANs). Resource tiers in the resource system are examined to if they are in compliance with a management policy. If a resource tier is not in compliance with the management policy, a processing operation automatically increases available capacity in containers in order to bring the containers in compliance with the management policy. The management policy may, for example, include a requirement that an expiration date of the resource tier occur after a maintenance date.

Time based multi-tiered management of resource systems

The present invention provides systems, methods and apparatus for automatically provisioning and managing resources in a computing utility. Its automation procedures are based on a resource model which allows resource-specific provisioning and management tasks to be encapsulated into components for reuse. These components are assembled into more complex structures and finally computing services. This invention provides a method for constructing a computing service from a set of resources given a high level specification. Once constructed, the service includes a component that provides management function, which can allow modification of its underlying set of resources.

Componentized automatic provisioning and management of computing environments for computing utilities

Methods, apparatus and systems for controlling allocation and de-allocation of resources in a computing utility system, and evaluating resource assignments. Resources are dynamically allocated to customers of the computing utility through computing environments in such a way that a given objective is satisfied. Assignment of resources to environments is affected by relationships between computing environments which enable resource sharing, and constraints regarding assignment of resources to environment which limit resource sharing. The invention may be used over all of the environments in the utility or a selectable subset.

Arbitration in a computing utility system

A system and method for projecting capacity of computer resources for a plurality of processing systems in a processing environment and for adjusting workload among said systems to improve resource utilization. An administrative processor determines the projected usage of computer resources for a plurality of computer systems in a processing environment by representing the capacity of each of the plurality of computer systems in a normalized unit and by sorting the capacities of the computer systems by the normalized or standardized units. The standardized unit, optimally time as measured as the life expectancy of each different resource of the computer system, is used for the N-axes of the N-dimensional space called a capacity space. Each computer system is mapped to a point in the capacity space, which normalizes configuration and capacity differences between systems by expressing the usage of all resources in the units of time. Once the normalized values have been defined and sorted, the administrative processor can make adjustments to the workload among the plurality of processing systems to improve the utilization of the capacity of the greatest number of processing systems in the processing environment.

System and method for analyzing capacity in a plurality of processing systems

A system and method for managing storage resources in a computer system. The invention periodically tracks and stores the history of each object stored in the storage resources. For each storage container, the life expectancy is calculated by utilizing the object histories for all objects currently stored in that container.

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Mahopac, NY, United States of America

Lily Barkovic Mummert