Infrastructure-Aware Autonomic Manager for Change Management

Typical IT environments of medium to large size organizations consist of tens of networks that connect hundreds of servers to support the running of a large variety of business-relevant applications; usually from different vendors. Change management is an important management processes that, if automated, can have a direct impact on increasing service availability in IT environments. Although such automation is considered important, the requirements of the appropriate policy engine, and policy language to express both high level and low level policies are far from clear. In this paper, we report our experiences in addressing these problems. In particular, we concentrate on availability policies - policies through which IT managers express the required availability of systems - and the autonomic manager that enforces them.