Driving resource management with application-level quality of service specifications

Today's computing environments are becoming more and more distributed in na ture. At the same time, the applications used in these environments are bec oming more complicated and are being used in more mission critical roles in the enterprise. Consequently, users' demands for performance, reliability, and availability, and availability are increasing rapidly. To meet these n eeds, a high level of quality of service must be delivered to the user. Doi ng so, however, is not an easy task. Because of considerable research effor t into this areal great strides are being made towards acceptable quality o f service solutions. As researchers in this area have recognized, there are still many challenging open problems needing to be addressed. One of the m ore interesting, yet difficult challenges is the specification of quality o f service-quality of service solutions must handle quality of service speci fications as application-level expectations, as opposed to low-level resour ce reservations. Doing so, however, has been proven to be a non-trivial tas k. To address this problem, we have developed an application-driven approac h to resource management to support quality of service. We present our gene ral strategy, the design of a solution realizing this approach, and a preli minary prototype implementation based on this architecture. We describe exp erimentation and experience to date and evaluate our work and its effective ness based on these preliminary results. Finally, we conclude with a summar y of our work and outline our plans to evolve it in the future. (C) 2000 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.