Managing the End-to-End Lifecycle of Global Service Policies

Enterprise business services are often deployed over complex environments, managed by multiple service-management products. For instance, a business service may be configured as a three-tier environment with multiple services that run on different resource domains and span one or more tiers, and comprising service-management products such as workload managers, business resiliency managers, and resource arbiters. The objective policies of the enterprise business service, henceforth called Global Service Policies, determine the runtime policies used by the various management products. The lifecycle management of global service policies, including the deployment and enforcement stages, inherits the complexity of the enterprise IT environment. This paper proposes a novel framework for efficiently managing the deployment and enforcement lifecycle stages. The framework enables the complete automation of the dissemination and translation of global policies for all service managers, for a low-cost, correct policy deployment. Also, the framework enables the runtime customization of the resource arbitration based on the business value models of the current global service policies, for a high quality of policy enforcement. The proposed framework is prototyped and integrated with several IBM service-management products.