GIT-CERCS-06-04
    Zhongtang Cai, Vibhore Kumar, Brian F. Cooper, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan, Robert E. Strom,
    Utility-Driven Availability-Management in Enterprise-Scale Information Flows

    Enterprises rely critically on the timely and sustained delivery of information, supported by middleware that ensures high-availability for such information flows. Our goal is to augment such middleware to create resilient information flows that deliver information while maximizing the utility end user applications derive from such information. Towards this end, this paper presents a `proactive availability-management' technique to offer (1) information flows that dynamically self-determine their availability requirement based on high-level utility specifications, (2) flows that can trade recovery time for performance based on the `perceived' stability and failure predictions (early alarm) for the underlying system, and (3) methods, based on real-world case studies, to deal with both transient and non-transient failures. We have incorporated `proactive availability-management' into information flow middleware, and experiments reported in this paper demonstrate its capability to self-determine availability guarantees, to offer improved performance over a statically configured system, and to be resilient to a wide-range of faults.