International Business Machines Corporation

Sandra D Miller

Tamar Eilam

Lily Barkovic Mummert

Gerd Breiter

Guerney D H Hunt

Andrea Schmidt

Jutta Kreyss

Guerney Douglass Holloway Hunt

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

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.

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.

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Winchester, United Kingdom

Sandra D Miller