Neptune: A Dynamic Resource Allocation and Planning System for a Cluster Computing Utility

We present Neptune - the resource director of Océano, a policy driven fabric management system that dynamically reconfigures resources in a computing utility cluster. Neptune implements an on-line control mechanism subject to policy-based performance and resource configuration objectives. Neptune reassigns servers and bandwidth among a set of service domains, based on pre-defined policy, in response to workload changes. It builds and executes a reconfiguration plan through a planning framework, breaking reconfiguration objectives into individual tasks delegated to set of lower level resource managers. We describe an example decision policy algorithm that we implemented and demonstrated in an 80 server multi-domain computing utility.