Risk-based proactive availability management---attaining high performance and resilience with dynamic self-management in enterprise distributed systems
Authors: Karsten Schwan
Venue:  (2008)

This thesis addresses complex distributed systems such as distributed information flow systems that continuously acquire, manipulate and disseminate information across an enterprise's distributed sites and machines, and distributed server applications co-deployed in one or multiple shared data centers, each with different and dynamic performance/availability requirements. A basic requirement imposed on such systems is the need to provide timely and sustained/reliable delivery and processing of service requests. This remains a difficult task despite more than 30 years of progress in distributed computer connectivity, availability and reliability, for multiple reasons. These include the increasing complexity of enterprise scale computing infrastructure; the distributed nature of these systems which make them prone to failures, e.g., because of inevitable Heisenbugs in these complex distributed systems; the need to consider diverse and complex business objectives and policies, including risk preferences and attitudes in enterprise computing; the issues of performance and availability conflicts; the varying importance of sub-systems that compete for resources in an enterprise's IT infrastructure; and the best effort nature of resources like networks, which implies that resource availability itself can be an issue. This thesis proposes a novel approach to business policy-driven, risk-based, automated availability management, which uses an automated decision engine to make availability decisions and meet business policies while optimizing overall system utility, uses utility theory to capture users' risk attitudes, and addresses the potentially conflicting business goals and resource demands in enterprise scale distributed systems. For critical and complex enterprise applications, since a key contributor to application utility is the time taken to recover from failures, we develop a novel proactive fault tolerance approach, which uses online methods for failure prediction to dynamically determine the acceptable amounts of additional processing and communication resources to be used (i.e., costs) to attain certain levels of utility and acceptable delays in failure recovery. Since resource availability itself is often not guaranteed in typical shared enterprise IT environments, this thesis provides 'IQ-Paths' with probabilistic service guarantee to address the dynamic network behavior in realistic enterprise computing environment. The risk-based formulation is used as an effective way to link the operational guarantees expressed by utility and enforced by the PGOS algorithm with the higher level business objectives sought by end users. In its totality, this thesis develops a novel availability management framework and methods for large-scale enterprise applications and systems, with the goal to provide different levels of performance/availability guarantees for multiple applications and sub-systems in a complex shared distributed computing infrastructure. More specifically, this thesis addresses the following problems. For data center environments, (1) how to provide availability management for applications and systems that vary in both resource requirements and in their importance to the enterprise, based both on operational level quantities and on business level objectives; (2) how to deal with managerial policies such as risk attitude; and (3) how to deal with the tradeoff between performance and availability, given limited resources in a typical data center. Since realistic business settings extend beyond single data centers, a second set of problems addressed in this thesis concerns predictable and reliable operation in wide area settings. For such systems, we explore (4) how to provide high availability in widely distributed operational systems with low cost fault tolerance mechanisms, and (5) how to provide probabilistic service guarantees given best effort network resources.