Quality of Service Management for Enterprise-Application Computing Utilities

企业信息技术(IT)经理日益关注的问题是，IT基础设施的系统维护和管理成本不断增加，而硬件/软件采购成本不断下降。这一差距正在扩大，因为系统管理和管理仍然是高度劳动密集型的，并且不能很好地随系统规模和复杂性进行扩展，尽管进行了广泛的研究来自动化这一过程。大幅降低这一成本的一种有希望的方法是采用计算实用模型，在这种模型中，集中管理的计算基础设施在多个企业应用程序之间共享，其方式保持了它们的高级业务目标。计算实用模型中的主要技术挑战是如何在没有人工干预的情况下提供和调度系统资源以支持共享相同物理基础设施的各个业务应用所需的服务质量(Qos)。该项目提出开发一种名为Iguacu的多维资源虚拟化系统，该系统将大型PC集群上的一组企业应用程序中的多个系统资源进行多路复用，以满足每个此类应用程序的延迟和/或吞吐量要求。Iguacu有三个关键创新。首先，与大多数以前侧重于单一系统资源的服务质量不同，Iguacu协调多个系统资源(包括CPU、磁盘和网络链路)的分配和调度，以满足特定于应用程序的服务质量要求，同时显著提高单个资源的利用效率。其次，Iguacu支持统一和可重复使用的实现框架，该框架可以快速地将给定的数据库密集型企业应用程序转换为基于服务特定性能指标提供保证的形式，只需进行零修改或轻微修改。这种框架的开发极大地减轻了在复杂的IT环境中部署支持服务质量的企业应用程序所需的工作量。第三，Iguacu采用了一种新的过程，可以自动将高级别的Qos规范转换为运行在集群环境中的分布式企业应用程序的物理系统资源需求。除了其智力贡献外，该项目预计将通过引入一系列系统管理和管理课程，对石溪大学计算机系的本科生和研究生教育产生重大影响，该课程将使用Iguacu原型作为可扩展PC集群的企业级系统管理系统的功能和实现细节的案例研究。最后，预计本项目开发的技术将通过网络/系统管理领域正在进行的研究合作，影响主要系统管理解决方案供应商国际计算机协会的未来产品方向。

A growing concern among corporate information technology (IT) managers is the elevating gap between the increasing system maintenance and administration cost of the IT infrastructure and the decreasing hardware/software acquisition cost. This gap is escalating because system administration and management is still heavily labor-intensive and does not scale very well with system size and complexity, despite extensive research efforts to automate the process. One promising approach to drastically reduce this cost is to adopt a computing utility model, in which a centrally managed computing infrastructure is shared among multiple enterprise applications in a way that preserves their high-level business objectives. The primary technical challenge in the computing utility model is how to provision and schedule system resources to support the desired quality of service (QoS) of individual business applications that share the same physical infrastructure without human intervention. This project proposes to develop a multi-dimensional resource virtualization system called Iguacu, which multiplexes multiple system resources among a set of enterprise applications on a large-scale PC cluster such that the delay and/or throughput requirement of each such application is satisfied. Iguacu features three key innovations. First, unlike most previous QoS efforts that focus on a single system resource, Iguacu coordinates the allocation and scheduling of multiple system resources, including CPU, disk, and network link, to meet application-specific QoS requirements while significantly improving individual resource's utilization efficiency. Second, Iguacu supports a unified and reusable implementation framework that could quickly convert, with zero or minor modification, a given database-intensive enterprise application into a form that provides guarantees based on service-specific performance metrics. The development of such a framework greatly mitigates the efforts required to deploy QoS-aware enterprise applications in a complicated IT environment. Third, Iguacu features a novel procedure that automatically translates high-level QoS specifications into physical system resource requirements for distributed enterprise applications running on a cluster environment.Besides its intellectual contributions, this project is expected to make a major impact on the undergraduate and graduate education of the Computer Science department at Stony Brook University by introducing a series of system management and administration courses, which will use the Iguacu prototype as a case study on the functionality and implementation details of an enterprise-scale system management system for scalable PC clusters. Finally, the technologies developed in this project are expected to influence the future product directions of a major system management solution vendor, Computer Associates International, through an on-going research collaboration in the network/system management area.