Patent Publication Number: US-8990810-B2

Title: Projecting an effect, using a pairing construct, of execution of a proposed action on a computing environment

Description:
TECHNICAL FIELD 
     This invention relates, in general, to managing customer environments to provide support for business resiliency, and in particular, to managing processing within a computing environment by programmatically controlling whether proposed actions are to be executed. 
     BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 
     Today, customers attempt to manually manage and align their availability management with their information-technology (IT) infrastructure. Changes in either business needs or the underlying infrastructure are often not captured in a timely manner and require considerable rework, leading to an inflexible environment. 
     Often high-availability solutions and disaster-recovery technologies are handled via a number of disparate point products that target specific scopes of failure, platforms or applications. Integrating these solutions into an end-to-end solution is a complex task left to the customer, with results being either proprietary and very specific, or unsuccessful. 
     Customers do not have the tools and infrastructure in place to customize their availability-management infrastructure to respond to failures in a way that allows for a more graceful degradation of their environments. As a result, more drastic and costly actions may be taken (such as a site switch) when other options (such as disabling a set of applications or users) could have been offered, depending on business needs. 
     Coordination across availability management and other systems-management disciplines is either nonexistent or accomplished via non-reusable, proprietary, custom technology. 
     There is little predictability as to whether the desired recovery objective will be achieved, prior to time of failure. There are only manual, labor-intensive techniques to connect recovery actions with the business impact of failures and degradations. 
     Any change in the underlying application, technologies, business recovery objectives, resources or their interrelationships require a manual assessment of impact to the hand-crafted recovery scheme. 
     SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION 
     Based on the foregoing, a need exists for a capability to facilitate management of an IT environment. In particular, a need exists for a capability to manage processing within the environment. As one example, a need exists for a technique to programmatically enforce whether proposed actions are allowed to execute. The enforcement is based on the projected effect execution of an action would have on the environment. 
     The shortcomings of the prior art are overcome and additional advantages are provided through the provision of a computer-implemented method to manage processing within a computing environment. The method includes, for instance, projecting an effect on the computing environment of execution of a proposed action, said proposed action selected based on real-time conditions of the computing environment; and programmatically determining, based on the projected effect, whether the proposed action is to be executed or is to be prevented from being executed. 
     Computer program products and systems relating to one or more aspects of the present invention are also described and claimed herein. 
     Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniques of the present invention. Other embodiments and aspects of the invention are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed invention. 
    
    
     
       BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS 
       One or more aspects of the present invention are particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed as examples in the claims at the conclusion of the specification. The foregoing and other objects, features, and advantages of the invention are apparent from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which: 
         FIG. 1  depicts one embodiment of a processing environment to incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention; 
         FIG. 2  depicts another embodiment of a processing environment to incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention; 
         FIG. 3  depicts yet a further embodiment of a processing environment to incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention; 
         FIG. 4  depicts one embodiment of a Business Resilience System used in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIG. 5A  depicts one example of a screen display of a business resilience perspective, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIG. 5B  depicts one example of a screen display of a Recovery Segment, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIG. 6A  depicts one example of a notification view indicating a plurality of notifications, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIG. 6B  depicts one example of a notification message sent to a user, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIG. 7  depicts one example of a Recovery Segment of the Business Resilience System of  FIG. 4 , in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIG. 8A  depicts examples of key Recovery Time Objective properties for a particular resource, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIG. 8B  depicts one example in which Recovery Time Objective properties collectively form an observation of a Pattern System Environment, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIGS. 9A-9C  depict one example of the logic to determine operation effect, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; 
         FIGS. 10A-10B  depict one embodiment of the logic to perform constraint analysis, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; and 
         FIG. 11  depicts one embodiment of a computer program product incorporating one or more aspects of the present invention. 
     
    
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION 
     In managing a customer&#39;s environment, such as its business environment, there is a set of requirements unaddressed by existing technology, which causes unpredictable down time, large-impact failures and recoveries, and significant extra labor cost, with resulting loss of business revenue. These requirements include, for instance:
         1. Ensuring that there is a consistent recovery scheme across the environment, linked to the business application, across the different types of resources; not a different methodology performed by platform silo. The recovery is to match the scope of the business application, not limited in scope to a single platform. The recovery is to be end to end and allow for interaction across multiple vendor products. In one example, a business application is defined as a process that is supported by IT services. It is supportive of the products and/or services created by a customer. It can be of fine granularity (e.g., a specific service/product provided) or of coarse granularity (e.g., a group of services/products provided).   2. Ability to group together mixed resource types (servers, storage, applications, subsystems, network, etc.) into logical groupings aligned with business processes requirements for availability.   3. Ability to share resources across logical groups of resources;   ability to nest these logical group definitions, with specifications for goal policy accepted and implemented at each level.   4. Pre-specified recommendations for resource groupings, with customization possible, and pattern matching customer configuration with vendor or customer provided groupings/relationships—to avoid requiring customers to start from scratch for definitions.   5. Ability to group together redundant resources with functional equivalence—use during validation when customer has less redundancy than required to meet the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) goal; in recovery to select an alternate resource for one that has failed.   6. Ability to configure the definition of what constitutes available, degraded, or unavailable based on customer&#39;s own sensitivity for a given grouping of resources, and business needs, and further aggregate the state across various resources to produce an overall state for the business application. The state is to be assessed real time, based on what is actually occurring in the system at the time, rather than fixed definitions. In some cases, a performance slowdown might flag a degraded environment, and in other cases, a failure may be necessary before flagging a degraded or unavailable environment. The definitions of available, degraded and unavailable are to be consumed by an availability system that evaluates them in the context of a policy, and then determines appropriate action, including possibly launching recovery automatically.   7. Ability to relate the redundancy capability of relevant resources to the availability status of a business application.   8. Allow customers to configure when recovery actions can be delegated to lower-level resources, particularly since resource sharing is becoming more relevant in many customer environments.   9. Include customer or vendor best practices for availability as prespecified workflows, expressed in a standards-based manner, that can be customized.   10. Ability to specify quantitative business goals for the recovery of logical groupings of resources, affecting both how the resources are preconfigured for recovery, as well as recovered during errors. One such quantitative goal is Recovery Time Objective (RTO). As part of the specification of quantitative business goals, to be able to include time bias of applications, and facilitate the encoding of appropriate regulatory requirements for handling of certain workloads during changing business cycles in selected businesses, such as financial services.   11. Decomposition of the overall quantified RTO goal to nested logical groups; processing for shared groups having different goals.   12. Ability to configure redundancy groupings and co-location requirements with resources from other vendors, using a representation for resources (which may be, for example, standards-based), with ability to clearly identify the vendor as part of the resource definition.   13. Ability to use customer&#39;s own historical system measures to automatically generate various system environments, then use these system environments when specifying quantitative recovery goals (since recovery-time achievability and requirements are not consistent across time of day, business cycle, etc.). The function is to be able to incorporate historical information from dependent resources, as part of the automatic generation of system environments.   14. Specification of statistical thresholds for acceptability of using historical information; customer specification directly of expected operation times and directive to use customer-specified values.   15. Environments are matched to IT operations and time of day, with automatic processing under a new system environment at time boundaries—no automatic internal adjustment of RTO is to be allowed, rather changed if the customer has specified that a different RTO is needed for different system environments.   16. Goal Validation—Prior to failure time. Ability to see assessment of achievable recovery time, in, for instance, a Gantt-chart-like manner, detailing what is achievable for each resource and taking into account overlaps of recovery sequences, and differentiating by system environment. Specific use can be during risk assessments, management requests for additional recovery-related resources, mitigation plans for where there are potentials for RTO miss. Example customer questions:
           What is my expected recovery time for a given application during “end of month close” system environment?   What is the longest component of that recovery time?   Can I expect to achieve the desired RTO during the “market open” for stock exchange or financial services applications?   What would be the optimal sequence and parallelization of recovery for the resources used by my business application?   
           17. Ability to prepare the environment to meet the desired quantitative business goals, allowing for tradeoffs when shared resources are involved. Ensure that both automated and non-automated tasks can be incorporated into the pre-conditioning. Example of customer question: What would I need to do for pre-conditioning my system to support the RTO goal I need to achieve for this business application?   18. Ability to incorporate operations from any vendors&#39; resources for pre-conditioning or recovery workflows, including specification of which pre-conditioning operations have effect on recoveries, which operations have dependencies on others, either within vendor resources or across resources from multiple vendors.   19. Customer ability to modify pre-conditioning workflows, consistent with supported operations on resources.   20. Ability to undo pre-conditioning actions taken, when there is a failure to complete a transactionally-consistent set of pre-conditioning actions; recognize the failure, show customers the optional workflow to undo the actions taken, allow them to decide preferred technique for reacting to the failure —manual intervention, running undo set of operations, combination of both, etc.   21. Ability to divide pre-conditioning work between long-running and immediate, nondisruptive short term actions.   21. Ability to divide pre-conditioning work between long running and immediate, nondisruptive short term actions.   22. Impact only the smallest set of resources required during recovery, to avoid negative residual or side effects for attempting to recover a broader set of resources than what is actually impacted by the failure.   23. Choosing recovery operations based on determination of which recovery actions address the minimal impact, to meet goal, and then prepare for subsequent escalation in event of failure of initial recovery actions.   24. Choosing a target for applications and operating systems (OS), based on customer co-location specifications, redundancy groups, and realtime system state.   25. Ability for customer to indicate specific effect that recovery of a given business process can have on another business process —to avoid situations where lower-priority workloads are recovered causing disruption to higher-priority workloads; handling situations where resources are shared.   26. Ability to prioritize ongoing recovery processing over configuration changes to an availability system, and over any other administration functions required for the availability system.   27. Ability for recoveries and pre-conditioning actions to run as entire transactions so that partial results are appropriately accounted for and backed out or compensated, based on actual effect (e.g., during recovery time or even pre-conditioning, not all actions may succeed, so need to preserve a consistent environment).   28. Allow for possible non-responsive resources or underlying infrastructure that does not have known maximum delays in response time in determining recovery actions, while not going beyond the allotted recovery time.   29. Allow customer to change quantified business-recovery goals/targets without disruption to the existing recovery capability, with appropriate labeling of version of the policy to facilitate interaction with change management systems.   30. Allow customers to change logical groupings of resources that have assigned recovery goals, without disruption to the existing recovery capability, with changes versioned to facilitate interaction with change-management systems.   31. Ability to specify customizable human tasks, with time specifications that can be incorporated into the goal-achievement validation so customers can understand the full time involved for a recovery and where focusing on IT and people time is critical to reducing RTO.   32. There is a requirement/desire to implement dynamically-modified redundancy groupings for those resources which are high volume —automatic inclusion based on a specified set of characteristics and a matching criteria.   33. There is a requirement/desire to automatically add/delete resources from the logical resource groupings for sets of resources that are not needing individual assessment.       

     The above set of requirements is addressed, however, by a Business Resiliency (BR) Management System, of which one or more aspects of the present invention are included. The Business Resiliency Management System provides, for instance:
         1. Rapid identification of fault scope.
           Correlation and identification of dependencies between business functions and the supporting IT resources.   Impact analysis of failures affecting business functions, across resources used within the business functions, including the applications and data.   Isolation of failure scope to smallest set of resources, to ensure that any disruptive recovery actions effect only the necessary resources.   
           2. Rapid granular and graceful degradation of IT service.
           Discontinuation of services based on business priorities.   Selection of alternate resources at various levels may include selection of hardware, application software, data, etc.   Notifications to allow applications to tailor or reduce service consumption during times of availability constraints.   
           3. Integration of availability management with normal business operations and other core business processes.
           Policy controls for availability and planned reconfiguration, aligned with business objectives.   Encapsulation, integration of isolated point solutions into availability IT fabric, through identification of affected resources and operations initiated by the solutions, as well as business resiliency.   Goal-based policy support, associated with Recovery Segments that may be overlapped or nested in scope.   Derivation of data currency requirements, based on business availability goals.   
               

     One goal of the BR system is to allow customers to align their supporting information technology systems with their business goals for handling failures of various scopes, and to offer a continuum of recovery services from finer-grained process failures to broader scoped site outages. The BR system is built around the idea of identifying the components that constitute a business function, and identifying successive levels of recovery that lead to more complex constructs as the solution evolves. The various recovery options are connected by an overall BR management capability that is driven by policy controls. 
     Various characteristics of one embodiment of a BR system include:
         1. Capability for dynamic generation of recovery actions, into a programmatic and manageable entity.   2. Dynamic generation of configuration changes required/desired to support a customer defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) goal.   3. Dynamic definition of key Pattern System Environments (PSEs) through statistical analysis of historical observations.   4. Validation of whether requested RTO goals are achievable, based on observed historical snapshots of outages or customer-specified recovery operation time duration, in the context of key Pattern System Environments.   5. BR system dynamic, automatic generation and use of standards-based Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) workflows to specify recovery transactions and allow for customer integration through workflow authoring tools.   6. Ability to configure customized scopes of recovery, based on topologies of resources and their relationships, called Recovery Segments (RSs).   7. Best practice workflows for configuration and recovery, including, but not limited to, those for different resource types: servers, storage, network, and middleware, as examples.   8. Ability to customize the definition of available, degraded, unavailable states for Recovery Segments.   9. Ability to represent customers&#39; recommended configurations via best practice templates.   10. Ability to define the impact that recovery of one business application is allowed to have on other business applications.   11. Ability to correlate errors from the same or multiple resources into related outages and perform root cause analysis prior to initiating recovery actions.   12. Quantified policy driven, goal-oriented management of unplanned outages.   13. Groupings of IT resources that have associated, consistent recovery policy and recovery actions, classified as Recovery Segments.   14. Handling of situations where the underlying error detection and notifications system itself is unavailable.       

     A Business Resilience System is capable of being incorporated in and used by many types of environments. One example of a processing environment to incorporate and use aspects of a BR system, including one or more aspects of the present invention, is described with reference to  FIG. 1 . 
     Processing environment  100  includes, for instance, a central processing unit (CPU)  102  coupled to memory  104  and executing an operating system  106 . Examples of operating systems include AIX® and z/OS®, offered by International Business Machines Corporation; Linux; etc. AIX® and z/OS® are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., U.S.A. Other names used herein may be registered trademarks, trademarks or product names of International Business Machines Corporation or other companies. 
     The operating system manages execution of a Business Resilience Runtime Component  108  of a Business Resilience System, described herein, and one or more applications  110  of an application container  112 . 
     As examples, processing environment  100  includes an IBM® System z™ processor or a pSeries® server offered by International Business Machines Corporation; a Linux server; or other servers, processors, etc. Processing environment  100  may include more, less and/or different components than described herein. (pSeries® is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., USA.) 
     Another example of a processing environment to incorporate and use aspects of a BR System, including one or more aspects of the present invention, is described with reference to  FIG. 2 . 
     As shown, a processing environment  200  includes for instance, a central processing complex  202  coupled to an input/output (I/O) subsystem  204 . Central processing complex  202  includes, for instance, a central processing unit  206 , memory  208 , an operating system  210 , a database management system  212 , a Business Resilience Runtime Component  214 , an application container  216  including one or more applications  218 , and an I/O facility  220 . 
     I/O facility  220  couples central processing complex  202  to I/O subsystem  204  via, for example, a dynamic switch  230 . Dynamic switch  230  is coupled to a control unit  232 , which is further coupled to one or more I/O devices  234 , such as one or more direct access storage devices (DASD). 
     Processing environments  100  and/or  200  may include, in other embodiments, more, less and/or different components. 
     In yet another embodiment, a central processing complex  300  ( FIG. 3 ) further includes a network service  302 , which is used to couple a central processing complex  300  to a processing environment  304  via a network subsystem  306 . 
     For example, network service  302  of central processing complex  300  is coupled to a switch  308  of network subsystem  306 . Switch  308  is coupled to a switch  310  via routers  312  and firewalls  314 . Switch  310  is further coupled to a network service  316  of processing environment  304 . 
     Processing environment  304  further includes, for instance, a central processing unit  320 , a memory  322 , an operating system  324 , and an application container  326  including one or more applications  328 . In other embodiments, it can include more, less and/or different components. 
     Moreover, CPC  300  further includes, in one embodiment, a central processing unit  330 , a memory  332 , an operating system  334 , a database management system  336 , a Business Resilience Runtime Component  338 , an application container  340  including one or more applications  342 , and an I/O facility  344 . It also may include more, less and/or different components. 
     I/O facility  344  is coupled to a dynamic switch  346  of an I/O subsystem  347 . Dynamic switch  346  is further coupled to a control unit  348 , which is coupled to one or more I/O devices  350 . 
     Although examples of various environments are provided herein, these are only examples. Many variations to the above environments are possible and are considered within the scope of the present invention. 
     In the above-described environments, a Business Resilience Runtime Component of a Business Resilience System is included. Further details associated with a Business Resilience Runtime Component and a Business Resilience System are described with reference to  FIG. 4 . 
     In one example, a Business Resilience System  400  is a component that represents the management of recovery operations and configurations across an IT environment. Within that Business Resilience System, there is a Business Resilience Runtime Component ( 402 ) that represents the management functionality across multiple distinct Recovery Segments, and provides the service level automation and the support of creation of the recovery sequences. In addition, there are user interface ( 404 ), administration ( 406 ), installation ( 408 ) and configuration template ( 410 ) components within the Business Resilience System that enable the administrative operations that are to be performed. Each of these components is described in further detail below. 
     Business Resilience Runtime Component  402  includes a plurality of components of the BR System that are directly responsible for the collection of observations, creation of PSEs, policy acceptance, validation, error detection, and formulation of recovery sequences. As one example, Business Resilience Runtime Component  402  includes the following components:
         1. One or more Business Resilience Managers (BRM) ( 412 ).
           The Business Resilience Manager (BRM) is the primary component containing logic to detect potential errors in the IT environment, perform assessment to find resources causing errors, and formulate recovery sequences to reestablish the desired state for resources for all Recovery Segments that may be impacted.   The Business Resilience Manager is a component of which there can be one or more. It manages a set of Recovery Segments, and has primary responsibility to formulate recovery sequences. The association of which Recovery Segments are managed by a given BRM is determined at deployment time by the customer, with the help of deployment time templates. BRMs are primarily responsible for operations that relate to error handling and recovery workflow generation, and cross RS interaction.   
           2. One or more Recovery Segments (RS) ( 414 ).
           Recovery Segments are customer-defined groupings of IT resources to which consistent availability policy is assigned. In other words, a Recovery Segment acts as a context within which resource recovery is performed. In many cases, Recovery Segments are compositions of IT resources that constitute logical entities, such as a middleware and its related physical resources, or an “application” and its related components.   There is no presumed granularity of a Recovery Segment. Customers can choose to specify fine-grained Recovery Segments, such as one for a given operating system, or a coarser grained Recovery Segment associated with a business process and its component parts, or even a site, as examples.   Relationships between IT resources associated with a RS are those which are part of the IT topology.   Recovery Segments can be nested or overlapped. In case of overlapping Recovery Segments, there can be policy associated with each RS, and during policy validation, conflicting definitions are reconciled. Runtime assessment is also used for policy tradeoff.   The Recovery Segment has operations which support policy expression, validation, decomposition, and assessment of state.   The number of Recovery Segments supported by a BR System can vary, depending on customer configurations and business needs.   One BRM can manage multiple Recovery Segments, but a given RS is managed by a single BRM. Further, Recovery Segments that share resources, or are subset/superset of other Recovery Segments are managed by the same BRM, in this example. Multiple BRMs can exist in the environment, depending on performance, availability, and/or maintainability characteristics.   
           3. Pattern System Environments (PSEs) ( 416 ).
           Pattern System Environments (PSEs) are representations of a customer&#39;s environment. Sets of observations are clustered together using available mathematical tooling to generate the PSEs. In one embodiment, the generation of a PSE is automatic. A PSE is associated with a given RS, but a PSE may include information that crosses RSs.   As one example, the representation is programmatic in that it is contained within a structure from which information can be added/extracted.   
           4. Quantified Recovery Goal ( 418 ).
           A quantified recovery goal, such as a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), is specified for each Recovery Segment that a customer creates. If customers have multiple Pattern System Environments (PSEs), a unique RTO for each PSE associated with the RS may be specified.   
           5. Containment Region (CR) ( 420 ).
           Containment Region(s) are components of the BR System which are used at runtime to reflect the scope and impact of an outage. A Containment Region includes, for instance, identification for a set of impacted resources, as well as BR specific information about the failure/degraded state, as well as proposed recovery. CRs are associated with a set of impacted resources, and are dynamically constructed by BR in assessing the error.   The original resources reporting degraded availability, as well as the resources related to those reporting degraded availability, are identified as part of the Containment Region. Impacted resources are accumulated into the topology by traversing the IT relationships and inspecting the attributes defined to the relationships. The Containment Region is transitioned to an inactive state after a successful recovery workflow has completed, and after all information (or a selected subset in another example) about the CR has been logged.   
           6. Redundancy Groups (RG) ( 422 ).
           Redundancy Group(s) ( 422 ) are components of the BR System that represent sets of logically equivalent services that can be used as alternates when a resource experiences failure or degradation. For example, three instances of a database may form a redundancy group, if an application server requires connectivity to one of the set of three, but does not specify one specific instance.   There can be zero or more Redundancy Groups in a BR System.   Redundancy Groups also have an associated state that is maintained in realtime, and can contribute to the definition of what constitutes available, degraded, or unavailable states. In addition, Redundancy Groups members are dynamically and automatically selected by the BR System, based on availability of the member and co-location constraints.   
           7. BR Manager Data Table (BRMD) ( 424 ).
           BR maintains specific internal information related to various resources it manages and each entry in the BR specific Management Data (BRMD) table represents such a record of management. Entries in the BRMD represent IT resources.   
           8. BR Manager Relationship Data Table (BRRD) ( 426 ).
           BR maintains BR specific internal information related to the pairings of resources it needs to interact with, and each entry in the BR specific Relationship Data (BRRD) table represents an instance of such a pairing. The pairing record identifies the resources that participate in the pairing, and resources can be any of those that appear in the BRMD above. The BRRD includes information about the pairings, which include operation ordering across resources, failure and degradation impact across resources, constraint specifications for allowable recovery actions, effect an operation has on resource state, requirements for resource to co-locate or anti-co-locate, and effects of preparatory actions on resources.   
           9. BR Asynchronous Distributor (BRAD) ( 428 ).
           The BR Asynchronous Distributor (BRAD) is used to handle asynchronous behavior during time critical queries for resource state and key properties, recovery, and for getting observations back from resources for the observation log.   
           10. Observation Log ( 430 ).
           The Observation Log captures the information that is returned through periodic observations of the environment. The information in the Observation Log is used by cluster tooling to generate Pattern System Environments (PSE).   
           11. RS Activity Log ( 432 ).
           Each RS has an activity log that represents the RS actions, successes, failures. Activity logs are internal BR structures. Primarily, they are used for either problem determination purposes or at runtime, recovery of failed BR components. For example, when the RS fails and recovers, it reads the Activity Log to understand what was in progress at time of failure, and what needs to be handled in terms of residuals.   
           12. BRM Activity Log ( 434 ).
           The BRM also has an activity log that represents BRM actions, success, failures. Activity logs are internal BR structures.   
           13. Transaction Table (TT) ( 436 ).
           The transaction table is a serialization mechanism used to house the counts of ongoing recovery and preparatory operations. It is associated with the RS, and is referred to as the RS TT.   
               

     In addition to the Business Resilience Runtime Component of the BR system, the BR system includes the following components, previously mentioned above.
         User Interface (UI) Component ( 404 ).
           The User interface component is, for instance, a graphical environment through which the customer&#39;s IT staff can make changes to the BR configuration. As examples: create and manage Recovery Segments; specify recovery goals; validate achievability of goals prior to failure time; view and alter BR generated workflows.   The user interface (UI) is used as the primary interface for configuring BR. It targets roles normally associated with a Business Analyst, Solution Architect, System Architect, or Enterprise Architect, as examples.   One purpose of the BR UI is to configure the BR resources. It allows the user to create BR artifacts that are used for a working BR runtime and also monitors the behaviors and notifications of these BR resources as they run. In addition, the BR UI allows interaction with resources in the environment through, for instance, relationships and their surfaced properties and operations. The user can add resources to BR to affect recovery and behaviors of the runtime environment.   The BR UI also surfaces recommendations and best practices in the form of templates. These are reusable constructs that present a best practice to the user which can then be approved and realized by the user.   Interaction with the BR UI is based on the typical editor save lifecycle used within, for instance, the developmental tool known as Eclipse (available and described at www.Eclipse.org). The user typically opens or edits an existing resource, makes modifications, and those modifications are not persisted back to the resource until the user saves the editor.   Predefined window layouts in Eclipse are called perspectives. Eclipse views and editors are displayed in accordance with the perspective&#39;s layout, which can be customized by the user. The BR UI provides a layout as exemplified in the screen display depicted in  FIG. 5A .   Screen display  500  depicted in  FIG. 5A  displays one example of a Business Resilience Perspective. Starting in the upper left corner and rotating clockwise, the user interface includes, for instance:
               1. Business Resilience View  502     This is where the user launches topologies and definition templates for viewing and editing.   2. Topology/Definition Template Editor  504     This is where the editors are launched from the Business Resilience View display. The user can have any number of editors open at one time.   3. Properties View/Topology Resources View/Search View  506     The property and topology resource views are driven off the active editor. They display information on the currently selected resource and allow the user to modify settings within the editor.   4. Outline View  508     This view provides a small thumbnail of the topology or template being displayed in the editor. The user can pan around the editor quickly by moving the thumbnail.   
               The topology is reflected by a RS, as shown in the screen display of  FIG. 5B . In  FIG. 5B , a Recovery Segment  550  is depicted, along with a list of one or more topology resources  552  of the RS (not necessarily shown in the current view of the RS).   In one example, the BR UI is created on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), meaning it has complete control over the Eclipse environment, window layouts, and overall behavior. This allows BR to tailor the Eclipse platform and remove Eclipse artifacts not directly relevant to the BR UI application, allowing the user to remain focused, while improving usability.   BR extends the basic user interface of Eclipse by creating software packages called “plugins’ that plug into the core Eclipse platform architecture to extend its capabilities. By implementing the UI as a set of standard Eclipse plug-ins, BR has the flexibility to plug into Eclipse, WebSphere Integration Developer, or Rational product installs, as examples. The UI includes two categories of plug-ins, those that are BR specific and those that are specific to processing resources in the IT environment. This separation allows the resource plug-ins to be potentially re-used by other products.   By building upon Eclipse, BR has the option to leverage other tooling being developed for Eclipse. This is most apparent in its usage of BPEL workflow tooling, but the following packages and capabilities are also being leveraged, in one embodiment, as well:
               The Eclipse platform provides two graphical toolkit packages, GEF and Draw2D, which are used by BR, in one example, to render topology displays and handle the rather advanced topology layouts and animations. These packages are built into the base Eclipse platform and provide the foundation for much of the tooling and topology user interfaces provided by this design.   The Eclipse platform allows building of advanced editors and forms, which are being leveraged for BR policy and template editing. Much of the common support needed for editors, from the common save lifecycle to undo and redo support, is provided by Eclipse.   The Eclipse platform provides a sophisticated Welcome and Help system, which helps introduce and helps users to get started configuring their environment. Likewise, Eclipse provides a pluggable capability to create task instructions, which can be followed step-by-step by the user to accomplish common or difficult tasks.   
               
           BR Admin Mailbox ( 406 ) ( FIG. 4 ).
           The BR Admin (or Administrative) Mailbox is a mechanism used by various flows of the BR runtime to get requests to an administrator to take some action. The Admin mailbox periodically retrieves information from a table, where BR keeps an up-to-date state.   As an example, the Admin Mailbox defines a mechanism where BR can notify the user of important events needing user attention or at least user awareness. The notifications are stored in the BR database so they can be recorded while the UI is not running and then shown to the user during their next session.   The notifications are presented to the user, in one example, in their own Eclipse view, which is sorted by date timestamp to bubble the most recent notifications to the top. An example of this view is shown in  FIG. 6A . As shown, a view  600  is presented that includes messages  602  relating to resources  604 . A date timestamp  606  is also included therewith.   Double clicking a notification opens an editor on the corresponding resource within the BR UI, which surfaces the available properties and operations the user may need to handle the notification.   The user is able to configure the UI to notify them whenever a notification exceeding a certain severity is encountered. The UI then alerts  650  the user of the notification and message when it comes in, as shown in  FIG. 6B , in one example.   When alerted, the user can choose to open the corresponding resource directly. If the user selects No, the user can revisit the message or resource by using the above notification log view.   
           BR Install Logic ( 408 ) ( FIG. 4 ).
           The BR Install logic initializes the environment through accessing the set of preconfigured template information and vendor provided tables containing resource and relationship information, then applying any customizations initiated by the user.   
           Availability Configuration Templates ( 410 ):
           Recovery Segment Templates
               The BR System has a set of Recovery Segment templates which represent common patterns of resources and relationships. These are patterns matched with each individual customer environment to produce recommendations for RS definitions to the customer, and offer these visually for customization or acceptance.   
               Redundancy Group Templates
               The BR System has a set of Redundancy Group templates which represent common patterns of forming groups of redundant resources. These are optionally selected and pattern matched with each individual customer environment to produce recommendations for RG definitions to a customer.   
               BR Manager Deployment Templates
               The BR System has a set of BR Manager Deployment templates which represent recommended configurations for deploying the BR Manager, its related Recovery Segments, and the related BR management components. There are choices for distribution or consolidation of these components. Best practice information is combined with optimal availability and performance characteristics to recommend a configuration, which can then be subsequently accepted or altered by the customer.   
               Pairing Templates
               The BR System has a set of Pairing Templates used to represent best practice information about which resources are related to each other.   
               
               

     The user interface, admin mailbox, install logic and/or template components can be part of the same computing unit executing BR Runtime or executed on one or more other distributed computing units. 
     To further understand the use of some of the above components and their interrelationships, the following example is offered. This example is only offered for clarification purposes and is not meant to be limiting in any way. 
     Referring to  FIG. 7 , a Recovery Segment RS  700  is depicted. It is assumed for this Recovery Segment that:
         The Recovery Segment RS has been defined associated with an instantiated and deployed BR Manager for monitoring and management.   Relationships have been established between the Recovery Segment RS and the constituent resources  702   a - 702   m.      A goal policy has been defined and validated for the Recovery Segment through interactions with the BR UI.   The following impact pairings have been assigned to the resources and relationships:       

     
       
         
           
               
               
               
               
               
             
               
                   
               
               
                 Rule 
                 Resource #1 
                 State 
                 Resource #2 
                 State 
               
               
                   
               
             
            
               
                   
               
            
           
           
               
               
               
               
               
            
               
                 1 
                 App-A 
                 Degraded 
                 RS 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                 2 
                 App-A 
                 Unavailable 
                 RS 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                 3 
                 DB2 
                 Degraded 
                 CICS 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                 4 
                 CICS 
                 Unavailable 
                 App-A 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                 5 
                 CICS 
                 Degraded 
                 App-A 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                 6 
                 OSStorage-1 
                 Unavailable 
                 CICS 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                 7 
                 OSStorage-1 
                 Unavailable 
                 Storage Copy Set 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                 8 
                 DB2 User &amp; Log 
                 Degraded 
                 DB2 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 Data 
                   
                   
                   
               
               
                 9 
                 OSStorage-2 
                 Unavailable 
                 DB2 User &amp; Log 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                   
                   
                 Data 
                   
               
               
                 10 
                 z/OS 
                 Unavailable 
                 CICS 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                 11 
                 z/OS 
                 Unavailable 
                 DB2 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                 12 
                 Storage Copy Set 
                 Degraded 
                 CICS User &amp; Log 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                   
                   
                 Data 
                   
               
               
                 13 
                 Storage Copy Set 
                 Degraded 
                 DB2 User &amp; Log 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                   
                   
                 Data 
               
               
                   
               
            
           
         
       
         
         
           
             The rules in the above table correspond to the numbers in the figure. For instance, #12 ( 704 ) corresponds to Rule 12 above. 
             Observation mode for the resources in the Recovery Segment has been initiated either by the customer or as a result of policy validation. 
             The environment has been prepared as a result of that goal policy via policy validation and the possible creation and execution of a preparatory workflow. 
             The goal policy has been activated for monitoring by BR. 
           
         
       
    
     As a result of these conditions leading up to runtime, the following subscriptions have already taken place:
         The BRM has subscribed to runtime state change events for the RS.   RS has subscribed to state change events for the constituent resources.       

     These steps highlight one example of an error detection process:
         The OSStorage-1 resource  702   h  fails (goes Unavailable).   RS gets notified of state change event.   1 st  level state aggregation determines:
           Storage Copy Set→Degraded   CICS User &amp; Log Data→Degraded   DB2 User &amp; Log Data→Degraded   DB2→Degraded   CICS→Unavailable   App-A→Unavailable   
           1 st  level state aggregation determines:
           RS→Unavailable   
           BRM gets notified of RS state change. Creates the following Containment Region:       

     
       
         
           
               
               
               
             
               
                   
               
               
                   
                 Resource 
                 Reason 
               
               
                   
               
             
            
               
                   
                 OSStorage-1 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
                 Storage Copy Set 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 CICS User &amp; Log Data 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 DB2 User &amp; Log Data 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 DB2 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 App-A 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
                 CICS 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
                 RS 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
               
            
           
         
       
         
         
           
             Creates a recovery workflow based on the following resources: 
           
         
       
    
     
       
         
           
               
               
               
             
               
                   
               
               
                   
                 Resource 
                 State 
               
               
                   
               
             
            
               
                   
                 OSStorage-1 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
                 Storage Copy Set 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 CICS User &amp; Log Data 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 DB2 User &amp; Log Data 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 DB2 
                 Degraded 
               
               
                   
                 App-A 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
                 CICS 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
                 RS 
                 Unavailable 
               
               
                   
               
            
           
         
       
     
     In addition to the above, BR includes a set of design points that help in the understanding of the system. These design points include, for instance: 
     Goal Policy Support 
     BR is targeted towards goal-based policies—the customer configures his target availability goal, and BR determines the preparatory actions and recovery actions to achieve that goal (e.g., automatically). 
     Availability management of the IT infrastructure through goal-based policy is introduced by this design. The BR system includes the ability to author and associate goal based availability policy with the resource Recovery Segments described herein. In addition, support is provided to decompose the goal policy into configuration settings, preparatory actions and runtime procedures in order to execute against the deployed availability goal. In one implementation of the BR system, the Recovery Time Objective (RTO—time to recover post outage) is a supported goal policy. Additional goal policies of data currency (e.g., Recovery Point Objective) and downtime maximums, as well as others, can also be implemented with the BR system. Recovery Segments provide the context for association of goal-based availability policies, and are the scope for goal policy expression supported in the BR design. The BR system manages the RTO through an understanding of historical information, metrics, recovery time formulas (if available), and actions that affect the recovery time for IT resources. 
     RTO goals are specified by the customer at a Recovery Segment level and apportioned to the various component resources grouped within the RS. In one example, RTO goals are expressed as units of time intervals, such as seconds, minutes, and hours. Each RS can have one RTO goal per Pattern System Environment associated with the RS. Based on the metrics available from the IT resources, and based on observed history and/or data from the customer, the RTO goal associated with the RS is evaluated for achievability, taking into account which resources are able to be recovered in parallel. 
     Based on the RTO for the RS, a set of preparatory actions expressed as a workflow is generated. This preparatory workflow configures the environment or makes alterations in the current configuration, to achieve the RTO goal or to attempt to achieve the goal. 
     In terms of optimizing RTO, there are tradeoffs associated with the choices that are possible for preparatory and recovery actions. Optimization of recovery choice is performed by BR, and may include interaction at various levels of sophistication with IT resources. In some cases, BR may set specific configuration parameters that are surfaced by the IT resource to align with the stated RTO. In other cases, BR may request that an IT resource itself alter its management functions to achieve some portion of the overall RS RTO. In either case, BR aligns availability management of the IT resources contained in the RS with the stated RTO. 
     Metrics and Goal Association 
     In this design, as one example, there is an approach to collecting the required or desired metrics data, both observed and key varying factors, system profile information that is slow or non-moving, as well as potential formulas that reflect a specific resource&#39;s use of the key factors in assessing and performing recovery and preparatory actions, historical data and system information. The information and raw metrics that BR uses to perform analysis and RTO projections are expressed as part of the IT resources, as resource properties. BR specific interpretations and results of statistical analysis of key factors correlated to recovery time are kept as BR Specific Management data (BRMD). 
     Relationships used by BR, and BR Specific Resource Pairing Information 
     BR maintains specific information about the BR management of each resource pairing or relationship between resources. Information regarding the BR specific data for a resource pairing is kept by BR, including information such as ordering of operations across resources, impact assessment information, operation effect on availability state, constraint analysis of actions to be performed, effects of preparatory actions on resources, and requirements for resources to co-locate or anti-co-locate. 
     Evaluation of Failure Scope 
     One feature of the BR function is the ability to identify the scope and impact of a failure. The BR design uses a Containment Region to identify the resources affected by an incident. The Containment Region is initially formed with a fairly tight restriction on the scope of impact, but is expanded on receiving errors related to the first incident. The impact and scope of the failure is evaluated by traversing the resource relationships, evaluating information on BR specific resource pairing information, and determining most current state of the resources impacted. 
     Generation and Use of Workflow 
     Various types of preparatory and recovery processes are formulated and in some cases, optionally initiated. Workflows used by BR are dynamically generated based on, for instance, customer requirements for RTO goal, based on actual scope of failure, and based on any configuration settings customers have set for the BR system. 
     A workflow includes one or more operations to be performed, such as Start CICS, etc. Each operation takes time to execute and this amount of time is learned based on execution of the workflows, based on historical data in the observation log or from customer specification of execution time for operations. The workflows formalize, in a machine readable, machine editable form, the operations to be performed. 
     In one example, the processes are generated into Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) compliant workflows with activities that are operations on IT resources or specified manual, human activities. For example, BRM automatically generates the workflows in BPEL. This automatic generation includes invoking routines to insert activities to build the workflow, or forming the activities and building the XML (Extensible Mark-Up Language). Since these workflows are BPEL standard compliant, they can be integrated with other BPEL defined workflows which may incorporate manual activities performed by the operations staff. These BR related workflows are categorized as follows, in one example:
         Preparatory—Steps taken during the policy prepare phase in support of a given goal, such as the setting of specific configuration values, or the propagation of availability related policy on finer-grained resources in the Recovery Segment composition. BR generates preparatory workflows, for instance, dynamically. Examples of preparatory actions include setting up storage replication, and starting additional instances of middleware subsystems to support redundancy.   Recovery—Steps taken as a result of fault detection during runtime monitoring of the environment, such as, for example, restarting a failed operating system (OS). BR generates recovery workflows dynamically, in one example, based on the actual failure rather than a prespecified sequence.   Preventive—Steps taken to contain or fence an error condition and prevent the situation from escalating to a more substantial outage or impact; for example, the severing of a failed resource&#39;s relationship instances to other resources. Preventive workflows are also dynamically generated, in one example.   Return—Steps taken to restore the environment back to ‘normal operations’ post recovery, also represented as dynamically generated workflows, as one example.
 
Capturing of Workflow Information
       

     Since the set of BR actions described above modify existing IT environments, visibility to the actions that are taken by BR prior to the actual execution is provided. To gain trust in the decisions and recommendations produced by BR, the BR System can run in ‘advisory mode’. As part of advisory mode, the possible actions that would be taken are constructed into a workflow, similar to what would be done to actually execute the processes. The workflows are then made visible through standard workflow authoring tooling for customers to inspect or modify. Examples of BPEL tooling include:
         Bolie, et al., BPEL Cookbook: Best Practices for SOA-based Integration and Composite Applications Development, ISBN 1904811337, 2006, PACKT Publishing, hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety;   Juric, et al., Business Process Execution Language for Web Services: BPEL and BPEL YWS, ISBN 1-904811-18-3, 2004, PACKT Publishing, hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.   http://www-306.ibm.com/software/integration/wid/about/?S_CMP=mav   http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/   http://www.parasoft.com/jsp/products/homejsp;jessionid=aaa56iqFywA-HJ?product=BPEL&amp;redname=googbpelm&amp;referred=searchengine%2Fgoogle%Fbpel
 
Tooling Lifecycle, Support of Managed Resources and Roles
       

     BR tooling spans the availability management lifecycle from definition of business objectives, IT resource selection, availability policy authoring and deployment, development and deployment of runtime monitors, etc. In one example, support for the following is captured in the tooling environment for the BR system:
         Visual presentation of the IT resources &amp; their relationships, within both an operations and administration context.   Configuration and deployment of Recovery Segments and BRMs.   Authoring and deployment of a BR policy.   Modification of availability configuration or policy changes for BR.   BPEL tooling to support viewing of BR created, as well as customer authored, workflows.   BPEL tooling to support monitoring of workflow status, related to an operations console view of IT resource operational state.
 
Policy Lifecycle
       

     The policy lifecycle for BR goal policies, such as RTO goals, includes, for example:
         Define—Policy is specified to a RS, but no action is taken by the BRM to support the policy (observation information may be obtained).   Validate—Policy is validated for syntax, capability, etc.; preparatory workflow created for viewing and validation by customer.   Prepare—Preparatory action workflows are optionally executed.   Activate—Policy is activated for runtime monitoring of the environment.   Modify—Policy is changed dynamically in runtime.
 
Configurable State Aggregation
       

     One of the points in determining operational state of a Recovery Segment is that this design allows for customers to configure a definition of specific ‘aggregated’ states, using properties of individual IT resources. A Recovery Segment is an availability management context, in one example, which may include a diverse set of IT resources. 
     The customer may provide the rules logic used within the Recovery Segment to consume the relevant IT resource properties and determine the overall state of the RS (available, degraded and unavailable, etc). The customer can develop and deploy these rules as part of the Recovery Segment availability policy. For example, if there is a database included in the Recovery Segment, along with the supporting operating system, storage, and network resources, a customer may configure one set of rules that requires that the database must have completed the recovery of in-flight work in order to consider the overall Recovery Segment available. As another example, customers may choose to configure a definition of availability based on transaction rate metrics for a database, so that if the rate falls below some value, the RS is considered unavailable or degraded, and evaluation of ‘failure’ impact will be triggered within the BR system. Using these configurations, customers can tailor both the definitions of availability, as well as the rapidity with which problems are detected, since any IT resource property can be used as input to the aggregation, not just the operational state of IT resources. 
     Failure During Workflow Sequences of Preparatory, Recovery, Preventive 
     Failures occurring during sequences of operations executed within a BPEL compliant process workflow are intended to be handled through use of BPEL declared compensation actions, associated with the workflow activities that took a failure. The BR System creates associated “undo” workflows that are then submitted to compensate, and reset the environment to a stable state, based on where in the workflow the failure occurred. 
     Customer Values 
     The following set of customer values, as examples, are derived from the BR system functions described above, listed here with supporting technologies from the BR system:
         Align total IT runtime environment to business function availability objectives:
           RS definition from representation of IT Resources;   Goal (RTO) and action policy specification, validation and activation; and   Tooling by Eclipse, as an example, to integrate with IT process management.   
           Rapid, flexible, administrative level:
           Alteration of operation escalation rules;   Customization of workflows for preparatory and recovery to customer goals;   Customization of IT resource selection from RG based on quality of service (QoS);   Alteration of definition of IT resource and business application state (available, degraded, or unavailable);   Customization of aggregated state;   Modification of topology for RS and RG definition;   Selection of BR deployment configuration;   Alteration of IT resource recovery metrics;   Customization of generated Pattern System Environments; and   Specification of statistical tolerances required for system environment formation or recovery metric usage.   
           Extensible framework for customer and vendor resources:
           IT resource definitions not specific to BR System; and   Industry standard specification of workflows, using, for instance, BPEL standards.   
           Adaptive to configuration changes and optimization:
           IT resource lifecycle and relationships dynamically maintained;   System event infrastructure utilized for linkage of IT resource and BR management;   IT resource recovery metrics identified and collected;   IT resource recovery metrics used in forming Pattern System Environments;   Learned recovery process effectiveness applied to successive recovery events;   System provided measurement of eventing infrastructure timing;   Dynamic formation of time intervals for aggregation of related availability events to a root cause; and   Distribution of achieved recovery time over constituent resources.   
           Incremental adoption and coexistence with other availability offerings:
           Potential conflict of multiple managers for a resource based on IT representation;   Workflows for recovery and preparatory reflect operations with meta data linked to existing operations;   Advisory mode execution for preparatory and recovery workflows; and   Incremental inclusion of resources of multiple types.   
           Support for resource sharing:
           Overlapping and contained RS;   Merger of CR across RS and escalation of failure scope; and   Preparatory and recovery workflows built to stringency requirements over multiple RS.   
           Extensible formalization of best practices based on industry standards:
           Templates and patterns for RS and RG definition;   Preparatory and recovery workflows (e.g., BPEL) for customization, adoption; and   Industry standard workflow specifications enabling integration across customer and multiple vendors.   
           Integration of business resilience with normal runtime operations and IT process automation:
           Option to base on IT system wide, open industry standard representation of resources;   BR infrastructure used for localized recovery within a system, cluster and across sites; and   Utilization of common system infrastructure for events, resource discovery, workflow processing, visualization.   
               

     Management of the IT environment is adaptively performed, as described herein and in a U.S. Patent Application “Adaptive Business Resiliency Computer System for Information Technology Environments,” (POU920070364US1), Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Many different sequences of activities can be undertaken in creating a BR environment. The following represents one possible sequence; however, many other sequences are possible. This sequence is provided merely to facilitate an understanding of a BR system and one or more aspects of the present invention. This sequence is not meant to be limiting in any way. In the following description, reference is made to various U.S. Patent Applications, which are co-filed herewith. 
     On receiving the BR and related product offerings, an installation process is undertaken. Subsequent to installation of the products, a BR administrator may define the configuration for BR manager instances with the aid of BRM configuration templates. 
     Having defined the BRM configuration a next step could be to define Recovery Segments as described in “Recovery Segments for Computer Business Applications,” (POU920070108US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Definition of a RS may use a representation of resources in a topology graph as described in “Use of Graphs in Managing Computing Environments,” (POU920070112US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     It is expected that customers will enable BR operation in “observation” mode for a period of time to gather information regarding key metrics and operation execution duration associated with resources in a RS. 
     At some point, sufficient observation data will have been gathered or a customer may have sufficient knowledge of the environment to be managed by BR. A series of activities may then be undertaken to prepare the RS for availability management by BR. As one example, the following steps may be performed iteratively. 
     A set of functionally equivalent resources may be defined as described in “Use of Redundancy Groups in Runtime Computer Management of Business Applications,” (POU920070113US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Specification of the availability state for individual resources, redundancy groups and Recovery Segments may be performed as described in “Use of Multi-Level State Assessment in Computer Business Environments,” (POU920070114US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Representations for the IT environment in which BR is to operate may be created from historical information captured during observation mode, as described in “Computer Pattern System Environment Supporting Business Resiliency,” (POU920070107US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. These definitions provide the context for understanding how long it takes to perform operations which change the configuration—especially during recovery periods. 
     Information on relationships between resources may be specified based on recommended best practices—expressed in templates—or based on customer knowledge of their IT environment as described in “Conditional Computer Runtime Control of an Information Technology Environment Based on Pairing Constructs,” (POU920070110US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Pairing processing provides the mechanism for reflecting required or desired order of execution for operations, the impact of state change for one resource on another, the effect execution of an operation is expected to have on a resource state, desire to have one subsystem located on the same system as another and the effect an operation has on preparing the environment for availability management. 
     With preliminary definitions in place, a next activity of the BR administrator might be to define the goals for availability of the business application represented by a Recovery Segment as described in “Programmatic Validation in an Information Technology Environment,” (POU920070111US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Managing the IT environment to meet availability goals includes having the BR system prioritize internal operations. The mechanism utilized to achieve the prioritization is described in “Serialization in Computer Management,” (POU920070105US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Multiple operations are performed to prepare an IT environment to meet a business application&#39;s availability goal or to perform recovery when a failure occurs. The BR system creates workflows to achieve the required or desired ordering of operations, as described in “Dynamic Generation of Processes in Computing Environments,” (POU920070123US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     A next activity in achieving a BR environment might be execution of the ordered set of operations used to prepare the IT environment, as described in “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment,” (POU920070117US1), Bobak et al, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Management by BR to achieve availability goals may be initiated, which may initiate or continue monitoring of resources to detect changes in their operational state, as described in “Real-Time Information Technology Environments,” (POU920070120US1), Bobak et al, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Monitoring of resources may have already been initiated as a result of “observation” mode processing. 
     Changes in resource or redundancy group state may result in impacting the availability of a business application represented by a Recovery Segment. Analysis of the environment following an error is performed. The analysis allows sufficient time for related errors to be reported, insures gathering of resource state completes in a timely manner and insures sufficient time is provided for building and executing the recovery operations—all within the recovery time goal, as described in “Management Based on Computer Dynamically Adjusted Discrete Phases of Event Correlation,” (POU920070119US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     A mechanism is provided for determining if events impacting the availability of the IT environment are related, and if so, aggregating the failures to optimally scope the outage, as described in “Management of Computer Events in a Computer Environment,” (POU920070118US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Ideally, current resource state can be gathered after scoping of a failure. However, provisions are made to insure management to the availability goal is achievable in the presence of non-responsive components in the IT environment, as described in “Managing the Computer Collection of Information in an Information Technology Environment,” (POU920070121US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     With the outage scoped and current resource state evaluated, the BR environment can formulate an optimized recovery set of operations to meet the availability goal, as described in “Defining a Computer Recovery Process that Matches the Scope of Outage,” (POU920070124US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Formulation of a recovery plan is to uphold customer specification regarding the impact recovery operations can have between different business applications, as described herein, in accordance with one or more aspects of the present invention. 
     Varying levels of recovery capability exist with resources used to support a business application. Some resources possess the ability to perform detailed recovery actions while others do not. For resources capable of performing recovery operations, the BR system provides for delegation of recovery if the resource is not shared by two or more business applications, as described in “Conditional Actions Based on Runtime Conditions of a Computer System Environment,” (POU920070116US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Having evaluated the outage and formulated a set of recovery operations, the BR system resumes monitoring for subsequent changes to the IT environment. 
     In support of mainline BR system operation, there are a number of activities including, for instance:
         Coordination for administrative task that employ multiple steps, as described in “Adaptive Computer Sequencing of Actions,” (POU920070106US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.   Use of provided templates representing best practices in defining the BR system, as described in “Defining and Using Templates in Configuring Information Technology Environments,” (POU920070109US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.   Use of provided templates in formulation of workflows, as described in “Using Templates in a Computing Environment,” (POU920070126US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.   Making changes to the availability goals while supporting ongoing BR operation, as described in “Non-Disruptively Changing a Computing Environment,” (POU920070122US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.       

     Making changes to the scope of a business application or Recovery Segment, as described in “Non-Disruptively Changing Scope of Computer Business Applications Based on Detected Changes in Topology,” (POU920070125US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
     Detecting and recovery for the BR system is performed non-disruptively, as described in “Managing Processing of a Computing Environment During Failures of the Environment,” (POU920070365US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety. 
     In order to build a BR environment that meets recovery time objectives, IT configurations within a customer&#39;s location are to be characterized and knowledge about the duration of execution for recovery time operations within those configurations is to be gained. IT configurations and the durations for operation execution vary by time, constituent resources, quantity and quality of application invocations, as examples. Customer environments vary widely in configuration of IT resources in support of business applications. Understanding the customer environment and the duration of operations within those environments aids in insuring a Recovery Time Objective is achievable and in building workflows to alter the customer configuration of IT resources in advance of a failure and/or when a failure occurs. 
     A characterization of IT configurations within a customer location is built by having knowledge of the key recovery time characteristics for individual resources (i.e., the resources that are part of the IT configuration being managed; also referred to as managed resources). Utilizing the representation for a resource, a set of key recovery time objective (RTO) metrics are specified by the resource owner. During ongoing operations, the BR manager gathers values for these key RTO metrics and gathers timings for the operations that are used to alter the configuration. It is expected that customers will run the BR function in “observation” mode prior to having provided a BR policy for availability management or other management. While executing in “observation” mode, the BR manager periodically gathers RTO metrics and operation execution durations from resource representations. The key RTO metrics properties, associated values and operation execution times are recorded in an Observation log for later analysis through tooling. Key RTO metrics and operation execution timings continue to be gathered during active BR policy management in order to maintain currency and iteratively refine data used to characterize customer IT configurations and operation timings within those configurations. 
     Examples of RTO properties and value range information by resource type are provided in the below table. It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that additional, less, and/or different resource types, properties and/or value ranges may be provided. 
     
       
         
           
               
               
               
             
               
                   
               
               
                 Resource Type 
                 Property 
                 Value Range 
               
               
                   
               
             
            
               
                 Operating System 
                 Identifier 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Ok, stopping, planned stop, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 stopped, starting, error, lost 
               
               
                   
                   
                 monitoring capability, unknown 
               
               
                   
                 Memory Size 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 Number of systems in sysplex, if 
                 integer 
               
               
                   
                 applicable 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Last IPL time of day 
                 Units in time of day/clock 
               
               
                   
                 Type of last IPL 
                 Cold, warm, emergency 
               
               
                   
                 Total Real Storage Available 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 GRS Star Mode 
                 Yes or No 
               
               
                   
                 Complete IPL time to reach 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 ‘available’ 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Total CPU using to reach 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 available during IPL 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Total CPU delay to reach 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 available during IPL 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Total Memory using to reach 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 available during IPL 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Total Memory delay to reach 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 available during IPL 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Total i/o requests 
                 Integer value, number of requests 
               
               
                   
                 Total i/o using to reach available 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 during IPL 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Total i/o delay to reach available 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 during IPL 
                   
               
               
                 Computer System (LPAR, 
                 Identifier 
                 Text 
               
               
                 Server, etc.) 
                   
                   
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Ok, stopping, stopped, planned 
               
               
                   
                   
                 down, starting, error, lost 
               
               
                   
                   
                 monitoring capability, unknown 
               
               
                   
                 Type of CPU - model, type, 
                 Text value 
               
               
                   
                 serial 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of CPUs 
                 integer 
               
               
                   
                 Number of shared processors 
                 integer 
               
               
                   
                 Number of dedicated processors 
                 integer 
               
               
                   
                 Last Activate Time of Day 
                 Units in time of day/clock 
               
               
                 Network Components 
                   
                   
               
               
                 Group of Network Connections 
                 Identity 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Operational State 
                 Ok, Starting, Disconnected, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 Stopping, Degraded, Unknown 
               
               
                   
                 State of each associated Network 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Application Connection 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Performance Stats on loss and 
                 Complex 
               
               
                   
                 delays 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Recovery Time for any 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 associated application network 
                   
               
               
                   
                 connections 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of active application 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 network connections associated 
                   
               
               
                   
                 at time of network problem 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Stopped Time/duration for 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 group of connectoins 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Maximum Network Recovery 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Time for any application 
                   
               
               
                   
                 connection in group 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Maximum Number of active 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 connections at time of network 
                   
               
               
                   
                 problem encountered, for any 
                   
               
               
                   
                 application connection in group 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Maximum Number of 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 connections processed at time of 
                   
               
               
                   
                 network recovery, for the group 
                   
               
               
                   
                 of connections 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Maximum network connection 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 recovery time/duration for any 
                   
               
               
                   
                 application connection in the 
                   
               
               
                   
                 group 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Maximum Number of 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 connections dropped at time of 
                   
               
               
                   
                 application network connection 
                   
               
               
                   
                 recovery, for any application 
                   
               
               
                   
                 connection in the group 
                   
               
               
                 Network Application Connection 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Ok, Stopping, Degraded, Error, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 Unknown 
               
               
                   
                 Configuration Settings 
                 Complex 
               
               
                   
                 Associated TCP/IP Parameter 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Settings 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Requirement Policies 
                 QoS or BR policies 
               
               
                   
                 Performance Statistics, rules, 
                 Complex 
               
               
                   
                 service class, number of active 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Network OS services 
                   
               
               
                   
                 State update Interval 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Last restart time of day 
                 Units in time of day/clock 
               
               
                   
                 Last Restart Time/Duration 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Network Recovery Time for app 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 connection 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of active connections at 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 time of network problem 
                   
               
               
                   
                 encountered, on a per app 
                   
               
               
                   
                 connection basis 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of connections 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 processed at time of network 
                   
               
               
                   
                 recovery, for the app connection 
                   
               
               
                   
                 application network connection 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 recovery time/duration 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of connections at time of 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 application network connection 
                   
               
               
                   
                 problem encountered 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of connections 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 processed at time of application 
                   
               
               
                   
                 network connection recovery 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of connections dropped 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 at time of application network 
                   
               
               
                   
                 connection recovery 
                   
               
               
                 Network Host Connection 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Ok, Stopping, Degraded, Error, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 Unknown 
               
               
                   
                 Configuration Settings 
                 Complex 
               
               
                   
                 Associated TCP/IP Parameter 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Settings 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Requirement Policies 
                 QoS or BR policies 
               
               
                   
                 Performance Statistics, rules, 
                 Complex 
               
               
                   
                 service class, number of active 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Network OS services 
                   
               
               
                   
                 State update Interval 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Last restart time of day 
                 Units in time of day/clock 
               
               
                   
                 Last Restart Time/Duration 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Number of QoS Events, 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 indicating potential degradation 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Number of QoS Events handled, 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 Last handled QoS Event 
                 Text 
               
               
                 Database Subsystem 
                 Name, identifier 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Operational State 
                 Operational, Nonoperational, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 starting, stopping, in recovery, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 log suspended, backup initiated, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 restore initiated, restore 
               
               
                   
                   
                 complete, in checkpoint, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 checkpoint completed, applying 
               
               
                   
                   
                 log, backing out inflights, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 resolving indoubts, planned 
               
               
                   
                   
                 termination, lost monitoring 
               
               
                   
                   
                 capability 
               
               
                   
                 Time spent in log apply 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Time spent during inflight 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 processing 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Time spent during indoubt 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 processing 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Total time to restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Checkpoint frequency 
                 Units of time 
               
               
                   
                 Backout Duration 
                 Number of records to read back 
               
               
                   
                   
                 in log during restart processing 
               
               
                   
                 CPU Used during Restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 CPU Delay during Restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Memory Used during Restart 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 Memory Delay during Restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 I/O Requests during restart 
                 Integer value of number of 
               
               
                   
                   
                 requests 
               
               
                   
                 I/O using during restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 I/O Delay during restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                 Database Datasharing Group 
                 Identifer 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Operational State 
                 Operational, nonoperational, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 degraded (some subset of 
               
               
                   
                   
                 members non operational), lost 
               
               
                   
                   
                 monitoring capability 
               
               
                   
                 Number of locks in Shared 
                 Integer value 
               
               
                   
                 Facility 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Time spent in lock cleanup for 
                 Elapsed time value 
               
               
                   
                 last restart 
                   
               
               
                 Database 
                 Identifier 
                 Text 
               
               
                 Tablespace 
                 Identifier 
                 Text 
               
               
                 Transaction Region 
                 Identifier 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Name 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Associated job name 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Maximum number of tasks/ 
                 Integer value 
               
               
                   
                 threads 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Restart type for next restart 
                 Warm, cold, emergency 
               
               
                   
                 Forward log name 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 System log name 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Operational State 
                 Operational, nonoperational, in 
               
               
                   
                   
                 recovery, starting, stop normal 
               
               
                   
                   
                 first quiesce, stop normal second 
               
               
                   
                   
                 quiesce, stop normal third 
               
               
                   
                   
                 quiesce 
               
               
                   
                 Time spent in log apply 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Time during each recovery stage 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Total time to restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 CPU Used during Restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 CPU Delay during Restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Memory Used during Restart 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 Memory Delay during Restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 I/O Requests during restart 
                 Integer value of number of 
               
               
                   
                   
                 requests 
               
               
                   
                 I/O connect time during restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 I/O Delay during restart 
                 Units of elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 System Logsize 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 Forward Logsize 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 Activity Keypoint frequency 
                 Integer - number of writes before 
               
               
                   
                   
                 activity checkpoint taken 
               
               
                   
                 Average Transaction Rate for 
                 Number of transactions per 
               
               
                   
                 this region 
                 second, on average 
               
               
                 Transaction Group 
                 Group name 
                 Text 
               
               
                 Transaction Region File 
                 Filename 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Region Name 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Dataset Name 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Operational State 
                 Operational/enabled, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 nonoperational/disabled 
               
               
                   
                 Open status 
                 Open, closed, closing 
               
               
                 Transaction 
                 Identifier 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 Operational State 
                 Running, failed, shunted, retry in 
               
               
                   
                   
                 progress 
               
               
                   
                 Region Name(s) that can run this 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 transaction 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Program Name 
                 Text 
               
               
                 Logical Replication Group of 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                 related datasets 
                   
                   
               
               
                   
                 State 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Required currency characteristics 
                 Complex 
               
               
                   
                 for datasets 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Required consistency 
                 Complex 
               
               
                   
                 characteristics for datasets 
                   
               
               
                 Replication Group 
                 Identity 
                   
               
               
                   
                 State 
                   
               
               
                 Replication Session 
                 Identity 
                   
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Established, in progress 
               
               
                   
                   
                 replication, replication successful 
               
               
                   
                   
                 complete 
               
               
                   
                 Type of Session 
                 Flash copy, metro mirror, etc. 
               
               
                   
                 Duration of last replication 
                 Units in elapsed time 
               
               
                   
                 Time of Day for last replication 
                 Units in time of day/clock 
               
               
                   
                 Amount of data replicated at last 
                 Units in MB 
               
               
                   
                 replication 
                   
               
               
                 Roleset 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                   
               
               
                 CopySet 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                   
               
               
                 Dataset 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Open, Closed 
               
               
                 Storage Group 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                   
               
               
                 Storage Volume 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Online, offline, boxed, unknown 
               
               
                 Logical Storage Subsystem 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                   
               
               
                 Storage Subsystem 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                   
                 State 
                   
               
               
                   
                 Subsystem I/O Velocity - ratio of 
                   
               
               
                   
                 time channels are being used 
                   
               
               
                 Replication Link (Logical) 
                 Identity 
                 Text 
               
               
                 between Logical Subsystems 
                   
                   
               
               
                   
                 State 
                 Operational, nonoperational, 
               
               
                   
                   
                 degraded redundancy 
               
               
                   
                 Number of configured pipes 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
                 Number of operational pipes 
                 Integer 
               
               
                   
               
            
           
         
       
     
     A specific example of key RTO properties for a z/OS® image is depicted in  FIG. 8A . As shown, for a z/OS® image  800 , the following properties are identified: GRS mode  802 , CLPA? (i.e., Was the link pack area page space initialized?)  804 , I/O bytes moved  806 , real memory size  808 , # CPs  810 , CPU speed  812 , and CPU delay  814 , as examples. 
     The z/OS® image has a set of RTO metrics associated therewith, as described above. Other resources may also have its own set of metrics. An example of this is depicted in  FIG. 8B , in which a Recovery Segment  820  is shown that includes a plurality of resources  822   a - m , each having its own set of metrics  824   a - m , as indicated by the shading. 
     Further, in one example, the RTO properties from each of the resources that are part of the Recovery Segment for App A have been gathered by BR and formed into an “observation” for recording to the Observation log, as depicted at  850 . 
     Resources have varying degrees of functionality to support RTO goal policy. Such capacity is evaluated by BR, and expressed in resource property RTOGoalCapability in the BRMD entry for the resource. Two options for BR to receive information operation execution timings are: use of historical data or use of explicitly customer configured data. If BR relies on historical data to make recovery time projections, then before a statistically meaningful set of data is collected, this resource is not capable of supporting goal policy. A mix of resources can appear in a given RS—some have a set of observations that allow classification of the operation execution times, and others are explicitly configured by the customer. 
     Calculation of projected recovery time can be accomplished in two ways, depending on customer choice: use of historical observations or use of customers input timings. The following is an example of values for the RTOGoalCapability metadata that is found in the BRMD entry for the resource that indicates this choice: 
     
       
         
           
               
               
             
               
                   
               
             
            
               
                 UseHistoricalObservations 
                 The resource has a collection of 
               
               
                   
                 statistically meaningful observations of 
               
               
                   
                 recovery time, where definition of 
               
               
                   
                 ‘statistically valid’ is provided on a resource 
               
               
                   
                 basis, as default by BR, but tailorable by 
               
               
                   
                 customers 
               
               
                 UseCustomerInputTimings 
                 The customer can explicitly set the operation 
               
               
                   
                 timings for a resource 
               
               
                   
               
            
           
         
       
     
     If the customer is in observation mode, then historical information is captured, regardless of whether the customer has indicated use of explicitly input timings or use of historical information. 
     The administrator can alter, on a resource basis, which set of timings BR is to use. The default is to use historical observations. In particular, a change source of resource timing logic is provided that alters the source that BR uses to retrieve resource timings. The two options for retrieving timings are from observed histories or explicitly from admin defined times for operation execution. The default uses information from the observed histories, gathered from periodic polls. If the customer defines times explicitly, the customer can direct BR to use those times for a given resource. If activated, observation mode continues and captures information, as well as running averages, and standard deviations. The impact to this logic is to alter the source of information for policy validation and formulation of recovery plan. 
     With respect to the historical observations, there may be a statistically meaningful set of observations to verify. The sample size should be large enough so that a time range for each operation execution can be calculated, with a sufficient confidence interval. The acceptable number of observations to qualify as statistically meaningful, and the desired confidence interval are customer configurable using BR UI, but provided as defaults in the BRMD entry for the resource. The default confidence interval is 95%, in one example. 
     There are metrics from a resource that are employed by BR to enable and perform goal management. These include, for instance: 
     
       
         
           
               
               
             
               
                   
               
               
                 Metric 
                 Qualification 
               
               
                   
               
             
            
               
                 Last observed recovery/restart time 
                 In milliseconds; 
               
               
                   
                 or alternately specifying units to use in calculations 
               
               
                 The key factors and associated 
                 Captured at last observed recovery time, and capturable 
               
               
                 values of the resource that affect 
                 at a point in time by BR 
               
               
                 recovery time 
                   
               
               
                 The key factors and associated 
                 Captured at last observed recovery time, and capturable 
               
               
                 values of the resource that affect 
                 at a point in time by BR 
               
               
                 other dependent resources’ recovery 
                   
               
               
                 times 
                   
               
               
                 Observed time interval from ‘start’ 
                 If there are various points in the resource recovery 
               
               
                 state to each ‘non-blocking’ state 
                 lifecycle at which it becomes non-blocking to other 
               
               
                   
                 resources which depend upon it, then: 
               
               
                   
                 Observed time interval from ‘start’ state to each 
               
               
                   
                 ‘non-blocking’ state 
               
               
                 Resource Consumption Information 
                 If the resource can provide information about its 
               
               
                   
                 consumption, or the consumption of dependent 
               
               
                   
                 resources, on an interval basis, then BR will use this 
               
               
                   
                 information in forming PSEs and classifying timings. 
               
               
                   
                 One example of this is: cpu, i/o, memory usage 
               
               
                   
                 information that is available from zOS WLM for an 
               
               
                   
                 aggregation of processes/address spaces over a given 
               
               
                   
                 interval. 
               
               
                   
               
            
           
         
       
     
     There is also a set of information about the resource that is employed—this information is provided as defaults in the BRMD entry for the resource, but provided to the BR team in the form of best practices information/defaults by the domain owners:
         The operational state of the resource at which the observed recovery time interval started.   The operational state of the resource at which the observed recovery time interval ended.   The operational states of the resource at which point it can unblock dependent resources (example: operational states at which a DB2 could unblock new work from CICS, at which it could allow processing of logs for transactions ongoing at time of failure . . . ).   Values of statistical thresholds to indicate sufficient observations for goal managing the resource (number of observations, max standard deviations, confidence level).       

     In addition to the resources defined herein as part of the IT configuration that is managed, there are other resources, referred to herein as assessed resources. Assessed resources are present primarily to provide observation data for PSE formation, and to understand impact(s) on managed resources. They do not have a decomposed RTO associated with them nor are they acted on for availability by BR. Assessed resources have the following characteristics, as examples:
         Are present to collect observation data for PSE formation.   Are present to understand impacts on managed resources.   No decomposed RTO is associated with an assessed resource.   They are resources on which resources managed by BR depend upon, but are not directly acted on for availability by BR.   They are resources removed (or not explicitly added) from the actively monitored set of resources by the BR admin during RS definition.   They are resources that BR does not try to recover and BR thus will not invoke any preparatory or recovery operations on them.       

     Similarly, there are likely scenarios where a resource exists in a customer environment that already has an alternative availability management solution, and does not require BR for its availability. However, since other resources that are managed by BR may be dependent on them, they are observed and assessed in order to collect observation data and understand their impacts on managed resources. Additionally, there may be resources that do not have alternative management solutions, but the customer simply does not want them managed by BR, but other managed resources are dependent upon them. They too are classified as assessed resources. 
     These assessed resources share many of the same characteristics of managed resources, such as, for example:
         They have an entry in the BRMD, depending on their use, and the BRMD entry has an indication of assessed vs. managed.   The RS subscribes to state change notifications for assessed resources (and possibly other notifiable properties).   Relationships between observed and managed resources are possible (and likely).   BR monitors for lifecycle events on assessed resources in the same manner as for managed resources.   Assessed resources can be added and/or removed from Recovery Segments.   They can be used to contribute to the aggregated state of an RS.       

     Finally, there are a few restrictions that BR imposes upon assessed resources, in this embodiment:
         Again, BR does not invoke any workflow operations on assessed resources.   A resource that is shared between two Recovery Segments is not categorized as an assessed resource in one RS and a managed resource in the other. It is one or the other in the RS&#39;s, but not both.       

     To facilitate the building of the customer&#39;s IT configuration, observations regarding the customer&#39;s environment are gathered and stored in an observation log. In particular, the observation log is used to store observations gathered during runtime in customer environments, where each observation is a collection of various data points. They are created for each of the Recovery Segments that are in “observation” mode. These observations are used for numerous runtime and administrative purposes in the BR environment. As examples the observations are used:
         To perform statistical analysis from the BR UI to form characterizations of customers&#39; normal execution environments, represented in BR as Pattern System Environments (PSE).   To classify operations on resources into these PSEs for purposes of determining operation execution duration.   Help determine approximate path length of operations that are pushed down from BR to the resources, and possibly to the underlying instrumentation of each resource.   Help determine approximate path length of activities executed within BPEL workflows.   Finally, the data collected via the observation is also used to update the metadata associated with the resource (i.e., in the BRMD table) where appropriate.       

     BR gathers observations during runtime when “observation mode” is enabled at the Recovery Segment level. There are two means for enabling observation mode, as examples:
         1. The BR UI allows the administrator to enable observation mode at a Recovery Segment, which will change its “ObservationMode” resource property to “True”, and to set the polling interval (default=15 minutes). The Recovery Segment is defined in order to allow observation mode, but a policy does not have to be defined or activated for it.   2. Once a policy is defined though and subsequently activated, observation mode is set for the Recovery Segment (due to the data being used in managing and monitoring the customer&#39;s environment). Thus, it is set automatically at policy activation, if not already set explicitly by the administrator (see 1 above) using the default polling interval (15 minutes).       

     The administrator may also disable observation mode for a Recovery Segment, which stops it from polling for data and creating subsequent observation records for insertion in the log. However, the accumulated observation log is not deleted. In one example, an RS remains in observation mode throughout its lifecycle. The UI displays the implications of disabling observation mode. 
     In BR, the observations that are collected by BR during runtime can be grouped into two categories, as examples:
         1. Periodic poll.   2. Workflow (includes workflow begin/end, and workflow activity begin/end).       

     A periodic poll observation is a point-in-time snapshot of the constituent resources in a Recovery Segment. Observation data points are collected for those resources in the Recovery Segment(s) which have associated BR management data for any of the following reasons, as examples:
         1. Resource has RTO properties.   2. Resource has operations.   3. Resource participates in the aggregated state for the Recovery Segment, in which it is contained.   4. Resource participates in any of the six types of pairing rules.       

     The full value of these observations is derived for an RS when they include data that has been gathered for its constituent resources, plus the resources that those are dependent upon. In one embodiment, the administrator is not forced to include all dependent resources when defining a Recovery Segment, and even if that were the case, there is nothing that prevents them from deleting various dependent resources. When defining a Recovery Segment, the BR UI provides an option that allows the customer to display the dependency graph for those resources already in the Recovery Segment. This displays the topology from the seed node(s) in the Recovery Segment down to and including the dependent leaf nodes. The purpose of this capability is to give the customer the opportunity to display the dependent nodes and recommend that they be included in the Recovery Segment. 
     Preparatory and recovery workflows are built by the BR manager to achieve the customer requested RTO policy based on resource operations timings. During active policy monitoring by the BR manager, measurements of achieved time for operations are recorded in observations to the log and used to maintain the running statistical data on operation execution times. Observations written to the log may vary in the contained resource RTO metrics and operation execution timings. 
     Observations are also collected from any of the BPEL workflows created by BR in the customer&#39;s environment. There is a standard template that each BR BPEL workflow uses. As part of that template, observation data is captured at the start of, during, and at the completion of each workflow. Specifically, in one example, one observation is created at the end of the workflow with data accumulated from completion of each activity. This information is used to gather timings for workflow execution for use in creating subsequent workflows at time of failure. 
     In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, programmatic enforcement of whether proposed actions are allowed or not allowed to execute is provided. The enforcement for a particular action is based on the projected effect on the environment (e.g., on another action, on a resource, on a business application, etc.) of executing that action. The actions proposed are selected based on the current real-time state of the environment. 
     Large enterprise customers have traditionally configured IT resources in support of multiple business applications and with high levels of utilization. Increasingly, with growing labor costs and shortage of skills, distributed computing customers are also looking to increase utilization levels and share IT resources. Difficulties arise when multiple business applications are deployed on a set of shared resources as conflicts may arise if insufficient capacity exists to meet the concurrent needs of all applications. Criticality of applications vary depending on customer and within customer depending on business cycles. Traditional approaches have utilized:
         Fixed sets of rules for apportionment of IT resources among applications which limits the flexibility and potential for optimal resource utilization.   Configuration parameters are set outside the context of business applications and must be manually changed resulting in an inflexible structure with high costs and high risk when change is needed.   Relationships between management disciplines are often not supported yielding an environment in which performance management, availability management, configuration management, change management, etc., operate in conflict with each other.   No expression of resource and resource relationships has generally been available to represent the full collection of servers, storage, network, operating system and middleware supporting business applications.   No means has been provided to insure changes to the environment which are needed to meet the goals of one business application or management discipline are permitted or disallowed based on the relative importance of one type of work vs. another.
 
Advantages of BR Business Application Impact Constraint Processing
       

     In accordance with one or more aspects of the present invention, BR provides a capability to utilize resource and resource relationships in conjunction with expressions of constraints and processing logic to enable sharing of IT resources among multiple business applications with explicit customer controls on the allowable impact to business application relationships from operations performed. This capability enables, for instance:
         Use of extensible expressions of resources and resource relationships to recognize shared IT resources between business applications where a business application is expressed as a Recovery Segment to BR.   The ability to express information on the projected effect execution of an operation on one resource will have on the same or another resource.   The ability to express the desired effect that operations on resources to achieve the availability of one business application can have on the availability of another business application.   The ability to dynamically, during runtime management, alter the specification of operation effect and constraint information.   Derive expression for BR from a more general set of business application to business application impact set of rules supporting interactions across multiple management disciplines.   The ability to programmatically enforce whether an action is to be performed, regardless of whether the action has shared or non-shared (i.e., dedicated) resources associated therewith.   The ability to project that the representation of a business application is a RS across management disciplines, and to project that op effect pairings can be applied to determine what changes would occur for other management discipline operations, such as a Workload Manager (WLM) altering memory allocation, or I/O priority or CPU dispatch priority. Then, op effect and constraint pairings are asserted and provide the basic control mechanisms to determine if such changes across management disciplines are to be allowed or disallowed.
 
Overview of Processing
       

     Support for expressing constraints one business application can have on another business application is built on, for instance, representations of resources, the programmatic representation of a business application, (e.g., RS), and information about operations, such as that defined in pairings. Constraints a customer wishes to have enforced for the impact one business application can have on another business application may be expressed as constraint pairings, in one implementation. Alternately, they may be expressed in a table that describes the business application to business application relationship. In one implementation, a business application is represented by a RS. When a RS is defined, resources are associated with the RS. If a resource is shared among two or more RSs, there exists the possibility for conflicts in recovery decisions as the resource is associated with two or more business applications which may have different Recovery Time Objective (RTO) goals. Determination of recovery actions are performed by BR for shared resources utilizing the context of the business applications which are utilizing the shared resource. 
     Initial specification of constraint pairings is achieved, in one example, through use of the BR admin UI. Templates representing best practices are provided by BR, in one implementation, to assist customers in establishing constraint pairings. Customer or vendor provided templates may also be utilized to establish pairings. During RS definition, templates can be selected for constraint pairings and customization of the pairings created and approved by the BR administrator. 
     Modification to constraint pairings can be performed during ongoing runtime operation of BR. Using the BR administrator&#39;s UI, existing constraint pairings can be modified or new constraint pairings can be created. Constraint pairings are utilized by BR after an error has been analyzed and operations to perform recovery for the error have been selected, as an example. Alterations to constraint pairings that are made active by the BR administrator take effect on the next error processed. 
     Where additional service level managers are deployed and manager to manager coordination functionality is desired, the BR constraint pairings may be extended. Where the system supports interactions of multiple management disciplines acting on the same resource, constraint pairings can be defined between business applications at a discipline level, then reconciled at the cross discipline level. The constraint ordering pairings become a direct derivative of the constraints reflecting the impact one business application can have on another business application in the manager to manager coordination. 
     Information on pairings is used to specify the effect executing an operation on a resource can have to the state of the same or another resource. Specifically, operation effect pairings enable vendors (e.g., IBM® and/or others) and customers to reflect a future state of a resource, as a result of potential execution of a resource operation. Operation effect pairings are used for support of constraint pairings as the future state of one RS, which is the result of execution of a process (e.g., a recovery process) realized by BR through operation effect pairings. 
     Operation Effect Pairings 
     In one example, once the scope of an error has been evaluated and recovery operations have been selected, an analysis of operation effect pairings may be performed. Operation effect pairing analysis precedes evaluation of constraint pairings. The process described below generates a list that includes, for instance, a list of doublets, where each doublet includes RS,RS_state resulting from execution of operations in the recovery process. 
     Although operation effect pairings are described herein with reference to recovery, they are not limited to recovery, but may also be used with other management functions. 
     Changes resulting from projected execution of resource operations on the state of a resource are indicated in operation effect pairings. Examples are:
         Operation “shutdown” on resource testdb2 indicates resource state becomes unavailable “(testdb2, shutdown) sets (testdb2,state=unavailable)”.   Operation “hyperswap_pprc_session” on LRG 1  indicates resource state becomes degraded “(LRG 1 , hyperswap_pprc_session”) sets (LRG 1 ,state=degraded)”.   Operation “hyperswap_pprc_session” on LRG 1  successful completion indicates resource state becomes available “(LRG 1 , hyperswap_pprc_session”) sets (LRG 1 ,state=available) when hyperswap_pprc_session_rc=successful.       

     In one example, operations to be performed in the recovery process alter the state of resources. Projecting the state change to the resource(s) resulting from recovery operation execution is performed in support of constraint analysis to understand if recovery of one RS should be allowed to impact another RS. The determination of effect can also be driven by the current environment characteristics by comparing, for example, property, value information cached for any resource with the trigger specified for the operation effect rule. 
     Syntax of Operation Effect Rules
         For resource operations that can effect the state of the same or different resource, the set of rules to represent the effect is as follows:
           (resourcea,resourcea_op) effect (resourceb,resourceb_state) set-of-conditions.   
           (resourcea,resourcea_op) and (resourceb,resourceb_state).
           The resource is to have a BR management data (BRMD) entry, in this example.   resourcea_op is to be a valid operation on the specified resourcea instance.   resourceb_state is to be one of the valid resourceb states.   
           Where effect is {sets}.   Where set-of-conditions are conditions under which this rule should trigger.
           RS Admin State of any RS the resource is related to, but are to specify which RS and which admin state.   RS Operational State (based on state composition) of any RS the resource is related to, but are to specify which RS and which operational state.   RS.CurrentPSE.   Property value settings in the BR management data entry of the resources that participate in the pairing.   Aggregated state of any resource involved in the RS(s) in the relationship.   Redundancy group state of any RG that involves the resource involved in the operation impact pairing.   Property, value settings of either of the resource in the operation impact pairing.
 
Constraint Pairings
   
               

     BR utilizes constraint pairings of (RS, RS_state) effect (RS, RS_state) set-of-conditions to determine what action to take when a resource is shared by two or more RSs or in other situations. The effect conditions supported are can and cannot, as examples. 
     Syntax of Constraint Rules
         For those RSs whose state can effect another RS, the set of rules to represent the impact is as follows:
           (RS 1 _state,value) impact (RS 2 _state,value) set-of-conditions   
           (RSx_state, value)
           The RS is to be a defined BR Recovery Segment instance.   RS_state,value is to be one of the valid values for RS state.   Each RS instance referenced here is to have an entry in the BR management data table.   
           Where impact is one of {can, cannot}.   Where set-of-conditions are conditions under which this rule should trigger.
           RS Admin State of any RS specified in the relationship, but are to specify which RS and which admin state.   RS.CurrentPSE.   Property value settings in the BRMD entry of the resources that participate in the pairing.   Aggregated state of any resource involved in the RS(s) in the relationship.   Redundancy group state of any RG that involves any resource involved in the RS(s) of the relationship.   Any Redundance Group that is related to any of the RS that reference this pairing information.   Property, value settings of either of the resources in either RS that participate in the relationship.   Nonblocking states for resources (a state which when achieved enables execution of operations on the same or other resources).   
               

     Example 1 
     RS 1  can cause RS 2  to: 1a) Fail or 1b) not to Fail 
     A recovery operation for RS 1  specifies “start cicsa on osi3”. 
     Customer has indicated that start cicsa on osi3 is to occur after shutdown testdb2 on osi3 if osi3 cpubusy &gt;30%. In one implementation, the customer can use operation ordering pairings to specify this requirement; alternately, a flat file that includes ordering requirements can be used. 
     On “start cicsa on osi3” indicates (“start cicsa on osi3” after “shutdown testdb2 on osi3” if “osi3 cpubusy &gt;30%”) 
     BR metadata on operation “shutdown” on resource testdb2 indicates resource state becomes unavailable “(Res_testdb2, shutdown) sets (Res_testdb2,state=unavailable)”. 
     In one implementation, the customer can use operation effect pairings to specify this requirement; alternately, a flat file that includes ordering requirements can be used. 
     BR impact pairing indicates “RES testdb2(state,unavailable) makes_unavailable RS 2 . 
     Nothing has indicated if RS 1  should cause RS 2  to be impacted. Constraint pairing could say:
         1a) “(RS 1 , in_recovery) can (RS 2 , unavailable) if PSEname=RS 1 primeshift.   1b) “(RS 1 , in_recovery) cannot (RS 2 , unavailable).       

     Example 2 
     RS 1  can cause RS 2  to: 2a) not be Degraded, 2b) be Degraded up to some Quantified Management Goal, such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO); 2c) be Degraded Beyond Some Quantified Goal, such as RTO 
     Have an op in recovery for RS 1  that says for recovery of RS 1 , LRG 1  is to be recovered and operation on LRG 1  is “hyperswap_pprc_session”.
         BR metadata on operation “hyperswap_pprc_session” on LRG 1  indicates resource state becomes degraded “(LRG 1 , hyperswap_pprc_session”) sets (LRG 1 ,state=degraded)”.   BR impact pairing indicates “LRG 1  degrades RS 1  when (LRG 1 , state=degrades)”.   BR impact pairing indicates “LRG 1  degrades RS 2  when (LRG 1 , state=degrades)”.       

     Nothing has indicated if RS 1  should cause RS 2  to be impacted. Constraint pairing could say:
         2a) “(RS 1 , in_recovery) cannot (RS 2 , degrades)”.   2b) “(RS 1 , in_recovery) can (RS 2 , degrades) when (LRG 1 , “op: hperswap_pprc_session”, op_duration)&lt;=(RS 2 , “prop: RTO_goal”).   2c) “(RS 1 , in_recovery) can (RS 2 , degrades)”.
 
Operation Effect and Constraint Analysis
       

     Constraint pairing analysis is undertaken by the BRM after, for instance, the Containment Region (CR) has been built and recovery operations selected. For each constraint pairing where a RS associated with the CR is referenced, BR assesses the impact to RS state. Assessment of constraint pairings follows assessment of operation effect assessment. Operation effect assessment determines states of RS(s) which would occur as the result of execution of operations in the recovery process (or other process). For each constraint pairing which references a RS impacted by the recovery indicated in the CR, BR assesses the constraint pairing. If recovery is not allowed based on the constraint pairings, BR logs the CR and associated error and recovery information, notifies the BR administrator through the mailbox, and leaves impacted resource(s) in state(s) resulting from the error. 
     Operation Effect 
     One embodiment of the logic to assess operation effect is described with reference to  FIGS. 9A-9C . As one example, the BRM performs this logic. The operation effect technique takes an input list of, for instance, recovery process actions having resource identification and operation (i.e., recov_operations_list), and outputs a list of impacted RS(s) (CR_RS_opeffect) and the one or more states that result from execution of the recovery process operations. 
     Referring to  FIG. 9A , processing begins by setting the list of impacted RS(s), CR.RS_opeffect list, to null, STEP  900 . An internal list, analyze_impact, used to determine what resource and resource operations are to be evaluated is also set to null, STEP  902 . For each resource/resource operation in the input list, recov_operation_list, STEP  904 , information is retrieved on the effect performing the operation has on a resource, STEP  906 . In one implementation, operation effect information may be obtained from a file containing lists of pairs of resource identification and operation identification followed by a resulting resource and state effect. In another implementation, which is described herein, pairings data is used. Pairings are selected from the BRRD by matching on the input resource/resource operation data and selecting operation effect pairings. 
     For each pairing returned, STEP  908 , conditions indicating current applicability of the pairing information is evaluated, STEP  910 . In one implementation, this could always indicate the pairing data is to be used. In another implementation, this evaluation is dependent on the conditions and triggers. If the pairing is currently applicable, INQUIRY  912 , the resource/resource state associated with the pairing is unioned with the list of resources/resource states for further analysis, analyze_impact, and processing continues at STEP  914 . Thereafter, or if the pairing is not currently applicable, processing continues at STEP  908 , until the pairings are processed. At that time, the logic returns to STEP  904 . 
     When the operations in the input recovery process list have been processed, STEP  904 , the first entry in the list of resource/resource state to be analyzed, analyze_impact list, is selected, STEP  916  ( FIG. 9B ). When all entries in the list of resource/resource state have been evaluated, INQUIRY  918 , processing ends. Otherwise, processing continues. 
     If the resource from the list of resource/resource state to be analyzed is a Recovery Segment (RS), INQUIRY  920 , that RS and RS_state are unioned with the output list, CR.RS_opeffect list, STEP  922 . 
     Thereafter, or if the entry is not a RS, pairings reflecting the impact a change in one resource state can have on other resources are selected, STEP  924 . In one implementation, this may be a file that includes records listing a first resource and resource state followed by a second resource and associated resource state. In another implementation, impact pairings may be utilized, as described herein. Pairings are selected such that resource 1  from the pairing matches the resource/resource state from the list entry under analysis. 
     When all returned pairings have been processed, STEP  926  ( FIG. 9C ), the next entry from the list of resource/resource state to be analyzed is selected, STEP  928 , and processing continues, STEP  918  ( FIG. 9B ). Otherwise, conditions determining if the pairing is currently applicable are evaluated, STEP  930  ( FIG. 9C ). If the pairing is currently applicable, INQUIRY  932 , a determination is made regarding equality of resource 2  state from the pairing and the current state of resource 2 , INQUIRY  934 . For example, if the pairing indicated that restart of an operating system would cause a CICS® subsystem to become failed, and the CICS® subsystem is already failed, resource 2  state in the pairing would match the current state of the resource. 
     If the current resource state is not the same as indicated in the pairing, INQUIRY  934 , resource 2  and resource 2  state from the pairing is added to the list of resource/resource state(s) to be analyzed, STEP  936 , by this routine. If resource 2  from the pairing is a RS, INQUIRY  938 , it is unioned with the set of RS/RS state entries to be returned from this routine, CR.RS_opeffect list, STEP  940 , and processing continues with STEP  926 . Similarly, a false evaluation from INQUIRIES  932 ,  934  or  938 , return processing to STEP  926 . 
     Constraint Analysis 
     One embodiment of the logic to perform constraint analysis is described with reference to  FIGS. 10A-10B . As one example, this logic is performed by the BRM. The constraint analysis routine takes an input list, impacted Recovery Segments (CR_RS_ImpactList), and a list of RS states that would result from execution of operations in the recovery process (CR_RS_opeffect_list, a list of doublets, each doublet comprised of RS,RS_state), and provides an output, which is a determination of whether the recovery process is allowed to be submitted or not. 
     Referring to  FIG. 10A , processing begins by setting a return code indicating that the recovery process (or other process) is to be allowed, STEP  1000 . Each RS in the input list of impacted RS(s), CR.RS_ImpactList, is evaluated, STEP  1002 . When all RS(s) have been evaluated processing ends. Otherwise, processing continues. 
     Pairings are selected by matching the RS/RS state to the first resource in the pairing, STEP  1004 . Constraint pairing information may be included in a file, where each record includes a RS/RS state and a second RS/RS state with indication of the impact being allowed or disallowed. In another implementation, constraint information may be contained in pairings, as used in this flow. 
     For each pairing returned, STEP  1006 , each entry in the input RS/RS state list of results of recovery process execution is evaluated, STEP  1008 . The RS from the resource 2  pairing under evaluation is compared to the RS in the RS/RS state entry under evaluation, INQUIRY  1010 . If these are equal, the pairing is analyzed to determine if the state from the pairing matches the state from execution of the recovery process, INQUIRY  1012 . 
     If the pairing matches the RS state, processing continues to determine if the constraint allows, “can”, or disallows, “cannot”, the change resulting from execution of the recovery process. If the effect is allowed, INQUIRY  1014  ( FIG. 10B ), processing continues, STEP  1008  ( FIG. 10A ). Otherwise, INQUIRY  1014  ( FIG. 10B ), the return code is set to indicate the recovery process is disallowed and the constraint analysis routine ends, STEP  1016 . 
     In a further example, where pairings have triggers, those triggers are evaluated to determining whether the pairings are currently applicable. 
     Returning to INQUIRIES  1010  and  1012 , if evaluated false, processing continues at STEP  1008  until the entries have been processed. At that time, processing returns to STEP  1006  until all the pairings have been processed. Then, processing returns to STEP  1002 . 
     In response to completion of the constraint analysis, an indication is provided as to whether a recovery process is allowed or disallowed. If allowed, for instance, a recovery process is prepared (e.g., take operations and place in form to be executed—e.g., invoke a workflow build routine; create a script; provide a command file, etc.), and optionally, invoke the recovery process. 
     Described in detail herein is a capability for programmatically (i.e., not manually) enforcing whether proposed actions are allowed or disallowed to execute. While the above example is described in the context of recovery operations, one or more aspects of the present invention are equally applicable to other management functions. 
     One or more aspects of the present invention can be included in an article of manufacture (e.g., one or more computer program products) having, for instance, computer usable media. The media has therein, for instance, computer readable program code means or logic (e.g., instructions, code, commands, etc.) to provide and facilitate the capabilities of the present invention. The article of manufacture can be included as a part of a computer system or sold separately. 
     One example of an article of manufacture or a computer program product incorporating one or more aspects of the present invention is described with reference to  FIG. 11 . A computer program product  1100  includes, for instance, one or more computer usable media  1102  to store computer readable program code means or logic  1104  thereon to provide and facilitate one or more aspects of the present invention. The medium can be an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system (or apparatus or device) or a propagation medium. Examples of a computer readable medium include a semiconductor or solid state memory, magnetic tape, a removable computer diskette, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), a rigid magnetic disk and an optical disk. Examples of optical disks include compact disk-read only memory (CD-ROM), compact disk-read/write (CD-R/W) and DVD. 
     A sequence of program instructions or a logical assembly of one or more interrelated modules defined by one or more computer readable program code means or logic direct the performance of one or more aspects of the present invention. 
     Advantageously, a capability is provided for programmatically determining whether a proposed action can be executed or whether it is to be prevented from execution. This determination is made based on the projected effect on the environment of executing the action. Advantageously, the actions that are proposed are selected based on the current real-time state of the environment (e.g., based on current resource state of resources of the environment and/or current relationships between the resources). In one example, the proposed actions are operations on resources to achieve recovery. 
     Although various embodiments are described above, these are only examples. For example, the processing environments described herein are only examples of environments that may incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention. Environments may include other types of processing units or servers or the components in each processing environment may be different than described herein. Each processing environment may include additional, less and/or different components than described herein. Further, the types of central processing units and/or operating systems or other types of components may be different than described herein. Again, these are only provided as examples. 
     Moreover, an environment may include an emulator (e.g., software or other emulation mechanisms), in which a particular architecture or subset thereof is emulated. In such an environment, one or more emulation functions of the emulator can implement one or more aspects of the present invention, even though a computer executing the emulator may have a different architecture than the capabilities being emulated. As one example, in emulation mode, the specific instruction or operation being emulated is decoded, and an appropriate emulation function is built to implement the individual instruction or operation. 
     In an emulation environment, a host computer includes, for instance, a memory to store instructions and data; an instruction fetch unit to obtain instructions from memory and to optionally, provide local buffering for the obtained instruction; an instruction decode unit to receive the instruction fetched and to determine the type of instructions that have been fetched; and an instruction execution unit to execute the instructions. Execution may include loading data into a register for memory; storing data back to memory from a register; or performing some type of arithmetic or logical operation, as determined by the decode unit. In one example, each unit is implemented in software. For instance, the operations being performed by the units are implemented as one or more subroutines within emulator software. 
     Further, a data processing system suitable for storing and/or executing program code is usable that includes at least one processor coupled directly or indirectly to memory elements through a system bus. The memory elements include, for instance, local memory employed during actual execution of the program code, bulk storage, and cache memory which provide temporary storage of at least some program code in order to reduce the number of times code must be retrieved from bulk storage during execution. 
     Input/Output or I/O devices (including, but not limited to, keyboards, displays, pointing devices, DASD, tape, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and other memory media, etc.) can be coupled to the system either directly or through intervening I/O controllers. Network adapters may also be coupled to the system to enable the data processing system to become coupled to other data processing systems or remote printers or storage devices through intervening private or public networks. Modems, cable modems, and Ethernet cards are just a few of the available types of network adapters. 
     Further, although the environments described herein are related to the management of availability of a customer&#39;s environment, one or more aspects of the present invention may be used to manage aspects other than or in addition to availability. Further, one or more aspects of the present invention can be used in environments other than a business resiliency environment. 
     Yet further, many examples are provided herein, and these examples may be revised without departing from the spirit of the present invention. For example, in one embodiment, the description is described in terms of availability and recovery; however, other goals and/or objectives may be specified in lieu of or in addition thereto. Additionally, the resources may be other than IT resources. Further, there may be references to particular products offered by International Business Machines Corporation or other companies. These again are only offered as examples, and other products may also be used. Additionally, although tables and databases are described herein, any suitable data structure may be used. There are many other variations that can be included in the description described herein and all of these variations are considered a part of the claimed invention. 
     Further, for completeness in describing one example of an environment in which one or more aspects of the present invention may be utilized, certain components and/or information is described that is not needed for one or more aspects of the present invention. These are not meant to limit the aspects of the present invention in any way. 
     One or more aspects of the present invention can be provided, offered, deployed, managed, serviced, etc. by a service provider who offers management of customer environments. For instance, the service provider can create, maintain, support, etc. computer code and/or a computer infrastructure that performs one or more aspects of the present invention for one or more customers. In return, the service provider can receive payment from the customer under a subscription and/or fee agreement, as examples. Additionally or alternatively, the service provider can receive payment from the sale of advertising content to one or more third parties. 
     In one aspect of the present invention, an application can be deployed for performing one or more aspects of the present invention. As one example, the deploying of an application comprises providing computer infrastructure operable to perform one or more aspects of the present invention. 
     As a further aspect of the present invention, a computing infrastructure can be deployed comprising integrating computer readable code into a computing system, in which the code in combination with the computing system is capable of performing one or more aspects of the present invention. 
     As yet a further aspect of the present invention, a process for integrating computing infrastructure, comprising integrating computer readable code into a computer system may be provided. The computer system comprises a computer usable medium, in which the computer usable medium comprises one or more aspects of the present invention. The code in combination with the computer system is capable of performing one or more aspects of the present invention. 
     The capabilities of one or more aspects of the present invention can be implemented in software, firmware, hardware, or some combination thereof. At least one program storage device readable by a machine embodying at least one program of instructions executable by the machine to perform the capabilities of the present invention can be provided. 
     The flow diagrams depicted herein are just examples. There may be many variations to these diagrams or the steps (or operations) described therein without departing from the spirit of the invention. For instance, the steps may be performed in a differing order, or steps may be added, deleted, or modified. All of these variations are considered a part of the claimed invention. 
     Although embodiments have been depicted and described in detail herein, it will be apparent to those skilled in the relevant art that various modifications, additions, substitutions and the like can be made without departing from the spirit of the invention and these are therefore considered to be within the scope of the invention as defined in the following claims.