Automation Under Service-Oriented Grids

Abstract

For some companies, information technology (IT) services constitute a fundamental function without which the company could not exist. Think of UPS without the ability to electronically track every package in its system or any large bank managing millions of customer accounts without computers. IT can be capital and labor intensive, representing anywhere between 1% and 5% of a companyʼs gross expenditures, and keeping costs commensurate with the size of the organization is a constant concern for the chief information officer (CIO)s in charge of IT.

A common strategy to keep labor costs in check today is through a deliberate sourcing or service procurement strategy, which may include in-sourcing using in-house resources or outsourcing, which involve the delegation of certain standardized business processes such as payroll to service companies such as ADP.

Yet another way of keeping labor costs in check with a long tradition is through the use of automation, that is, the integrated use of technology, machines, computers, and processes to reduce the cost of labor.

The convergence of three technology domains, namely virtualization, service orientation, and grid computing promises to bring the automation of provision and delivery of IT services to levels never seen before. An IT environment where these three technology domains coexist is said to be a virtual service-oriented environment or VSG environment. The cost savings are accrued through systemic reuse of resources and the ability to quickly integrate resources not just within one department, but across the whole company and beyond.

In this Chapter we will review each of the constituent technologies for a virtual service-oriented grid and examine how each contributes to the automation of delivery of IT services.

The increasing adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) represents the increasing recognition by IT organizations of the need for business and technology alignment. In fact, under SOA there is no difference between the two. The unit of delivery for SOA is a service, which is usually defined in business terms.

In other words, SOA represents the up-leveling of IT, empowering IT organizations to meet the business needs of the community they serve. This up-leveling creates a gap, because for IT business requirements eventually need to be translated into technology-based solutions.

Our research indicates that this gap is being fulfilled by the resurgence of two very old technologies, namely virtualization and grid computing.

To begin with, SOA allowed the decoupling of data from applications through the magic of extensible mark-up language (XML).

A lot of work that used to be done by application developers and integrators now gets done by computers. When most data centers run at 5–10% utilization, growing and deploying more data centers is not a good solution. Virtualization technology came in very handy to address this situation, allowing the decoupling of applications from the platforms on which they run. It acts as the gearbox in a car, ensuring efficient transmission of power from the engine to the wheels.

The net effect of virtualization is that it allows utilization factors to increase to 60–70%. The technique has been applied to mainframes for decades. Deploying virtualization to tens of thousands of servers has not been easy.

Finally, grid technology has allowed very fast, on-the-fly resource management, where resources are allocated not when a physical server is provisioned, but for each instance that a program is run.