A Biologically-Inspired Autonomic Architecture for Self-Healing Data Centers

This paper describes a biologically-inspired architecture, called SymbioticSphere, which allows data centers to autonomously adapt to dynamic environmental changes and survive partial system failures. SymbioticSphere follows certain biological principles such as decentralization, natural selection, emergence and symbiosis to design data centers (application services and middleware platforms). Each service and platform is modeled as a biological entity, analogous to an individual bee in a bee colony, and implements biological concepts such as energy level, health level, energy exchange, environment sensing, migration, replication and death. Simulation results show that, like in biological systems, desirable system properties in data centers (e.g., adaptability and survivability) emerge from collective actions and interactions of services and platforms