In this paper we describe a framework for providing customers of Web services differentiated levels of service through the use of automated management and service level agreements (SLAs). The framework comprises the Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) language, designed to specify SLAs in a flexible and individualized way, a system to provision resources based on service level objectives, a workload management system that prioritizes requests according to the associated SLAs, and a system to monitor compliance with the SLA. This framework was implemented as the utility computing services part of the IBM Emerging Technologies Tool Kit, which is publicly available on the IBM alphaWorks™ Web site.

The establishment of the Web application as a successful application model may be attributed to its adherence to open standards, to the powerful J2EE™ application framework for the execution of business and process logic, and to its integration with heterogeneous external systems, transactional processes, and Web technologies. In addition, effective tool support has enabled rapid development and deployment, powerful processes composed from components, and access to a steadily increasing range of function. Many Web applications are designed for high performance, scalability, and highly reliable utilization and are capable of extending modes of usage and growing throughput. Successful application development in these environments involves bridging the gap between exercising available programming specifications and the proper design, coding, and life-cycle management of the application. This paper addresses issues, transactional and nontransactional, in application development that are important for the successful deployment and execution of enterprise Web applications in production environments. These issues are based on experience with deployments of Web applications in various customer environments and are not new, but are either fundamental to previous transactional systems or have appeared in other classes of applications. Understanding these issues is essential both to building effective tooling to support the runtimes and to the evolution and definition of the runtimes themselves.

It has become increasingly desirable for companies worldwide to outsource their complex e-business infrastructure under the utility computing paradigm by means of service level agreements (SLAs). A successful utility computing provider must be able not only to satisfy its customers' demand for high service-quality standards, but also to fulfill its service-quality commitments based upon business objectives (e.g., cost-effectively minimizing the exposed business impact of service level violations). This paper presents the design rationale of a business-objectives-based utility computing SLA management system, called SAM, along with implementation experiences.

The utility business model is shaped by a number of characteristics that are typical in public services: users consider the service a necessity, high reliability of service is critical, the ability to fully utilize capacity is limited, and services are scalable and benefit from economies of scale. This paper examines the utility business model and its future role in the provision of computing services.

The goal of IBM's autonomic computing strategy is to deliver information technology environments with improved self-management capabilities, such as self-healing, self-protection, self-optimization, and self-configuration. Data correlation and inference technologies can be used as core components to build autonomic computing systems. They can also be used to perform automated and continuous analysis of enterprise-wide event data based upon user-defined configurable rules, such as those intended for detecting threats or system failures. Furthermore, they may trigger corrective actions for protecting or healing the system. In this paper, we discuss the use of ontologies as a high-level, expressive, conceptual modeling approach for describing the knowledge upon which the processing of a correlation engine is based. The introduction of explicit models of state-based information technology resources into the correlation technology approach allows the construction of autonomic computing systems that are capable of dealing with policy-based goals on a higher abstraction level. We demonstrate some of the benefits of this approach by applying it to a particular IBM implementation, the eAutomation correlation engine.

This paper describes a comprehensive set of technologies that enables rich interaction paradigms for Web applications. These technologies improve the richness of user interfaces and the responsiveness of user interactions. Furthermore, they support disconnected or weakly connected modes of operation. The technologies can be used in conjunction with many Web browsers and client platforms, interacting with a J2EE™ server. The approach is based on projecting the server-side model-view-controller paradigm onto the client. This approach is firmly rooted in the Web paradigm and proposes a series of incremental extensions. Most of the described technologies have been adopted by IBM server (WebSphere®) and client products.

The Lotus Discovery Server™ (LDS) is a knowledge management system that lets users browse and search for information and expertise, collaborate instantly with colleagues, share knowledge, and look for resources, in a time-efficient manner. Because a knowledge management system has the power to make visible what was previously obscure, privacy issues are of particular concern. This paper discusses what the LDS product team learned about privacy issues in an enterprise knowledge management product, how it learned these things, and what steps the team took to protect users' privacy, allay their concerns, and promote the value of the product.

Storage systems are built by taking the basic capability of a storage device, such as the hard disk drive, and adding layers of hardware and software to obtain a highly reliable, high-performance, and easily managed system. We explain in this paper how storage systems have evolved over five decades to meet changing customer needs. First, we briefly trace the development of the control unit, RAID (redundant array of independent disks) technologies, copy services, and basic storage management technologies. Then, we describe how the emergence of low-cost local area data networking has allowed the development of network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) technologies, and we explain how block virtualization and SAN file systems are necessary to fully reap the benefits of these technologies. We also discuss how the recent trend in storage systems toward managing complexity, ease-of-use, and lowering the total cost of ownership has led to the development of autonomic storage. We conclude with our assessment of the current state-of-the-art by presenting a set of challenges driving research and development efforts in storage systems.

In this Technical Forum article, we describe a generalized management framework for application complexes in multitiered cluster environments. The application complexes can be viewed as distinct autonomic computing entities that live together in thecluster. The management framework was implemented on a rack-mounted cluster of servers using the IBM Director management tool.