Dependability and Security Metrics in Controlling Infrastructure
Imre Kocsis, György Csertán, Péter László Pásztor, András Pataricza · 2008
Large, distributed IT infrastructures providing business-critical services have to protect themselves against internal and external threats and adapt to changing environmental parameters, as workload. Most widely applied, structural resilience mechanisms use some form of local static redundancy deployed to each critical resource for failover. However, recently both large-scale interconnected distributed systems and virtualization enable online structural reconfiguration exploiting a globally managed spare capacity as on-demand failover resource. In this paper, we present system and service resilience as a control problem and briefly describe how classes of the widely used, but vague notion of 'IT metrics' map to theconcepts of generic control with a special emphasis on the control aspects of structural reconfiguration as a generic resilience mechanism. Most importantly, we introduce some initial metrics that aim at measuring the self-healing capability of systems employing structural reconfiguration.