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.