Business aware Policy-based Management

In this paper, we introduce a business aware framework for the policy-based management of IT Systems and its application to utility computing environments. The framework couples two main subsystems on top of an IETF-like policy-based resource control layer. They are MBO (Management by Business Objectives) where the decision ability supported by analysis of business objectives resides, and GSLA (Generalized SLA), an advanced framework for SLA driven management that lends itself quite naturally to the derivation of IT management policies from the SLAs that the enterprise has contracted. We discuss the advantages and the limitations of the state-of-art policy-based approach to systems management, mainly the lack of business and service level context to drive policy-related decisions at system runtime. We then explain how this is remedied in our framework through the interaction mechanism between the reactive policy-based resource control layer and the more proactive business driven decision making engine.