Utility-Driven Proactive Management of Availability in Enterprise-Scale Information Flows

Enterprises rely critically on the timely and sustained delivery of information. To support this need, we augment information flow middleware with new functionality that provides high levels of availability to distributed applications while at the same time maximizing the utility end users derive from such information. Specifically, the paper presents utility-driven ‘proactive availability-management’ techniques to offer (1) information flows that dynamically self-determine their availability requirement based on high-level utility specifications, (2) flows that can trade recovery time for performance based on the ‘perceived’ stability of and failure predictions (early alarm) for the underlying system, and (3) methods, based on real-world case studies, to deal with both transient and non-transient failures. Utility-driven ‘proactive availability-management’ is integrated into information flow middleware and used with representative applications. Experiments reported in the paper demonstrate middleware capability to self-determine availability guarantees, to offer improved performance versus a statically configured system, and to be resilient to a wide range of faults.