—Policy-driven service management helps reduce IT management cost and it keeps the service management aligned with business objectives. While most of the previous research focuses on performance/resource managements, little has been researched in the area of availability management driven by business policies. This is a critically important task in enterprise IT, because a single failure in enterprise IT could cause huge business loss. It is still unclear how we can automate the availability management in a highly dynamic and complex system according to business level objectives for performance and risk attitude/preference. As a consequence, users can not manage the availability/performance ratio to match their risk tolerance. In this paper, we propose a policy-driven approach to automate run-time availability management in IT systems, according to high level availability and performance objectives. We further apply von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory to deal with users' risk...
Zhongtang Cai, Yuan Chen, Vibhore Kumar, Dejan S.