SLA based profit optimization in multi-tier systems

Abstract

Nowadays, large service centers provide computational capacity to many customers by sharing a pool of IT resources. The service providers and their customers negotiate utility based Service Level Agreement (SLA) to determine the costs and penalties on the base of the achieved performance level. The system is often based on a multi-tier architecture to service requests. The service provider would like to maximize the SLA revenues, while minimizing its operating costs. The system we consider is based on a centralized network dispatcher which controls the allocation of applications to servers, the request volumes at various servers and the scheduling policy at each server. The dispatcher can also decide to turn ON or OFF servers depending on the system load. This paper designs a resource allocation scheduler for such multi-tier environments so as to maximize the profits associated with multiple class SLAs. The overall problem is NP-hard. We develop heuristic solutions by implementing a local-search algorithm. Results are presented to demonstrate the benefits of our approach. © 2005 IEEE.