Policy Technologies for Self-Managing Systems Dakshi Agrawal Calo Seraphin Kang-won Lee Jorge Lobo Dinesh Verma Use policies to build self-managing IT systems that save money, improve availability, and enhance agility IT policies can be used to guide and automate decision making in the management of computer and network infrastructure, helping IT organizations reduce costs, improve service quality, and enhance business agility. Now, a team of top IBM researchers introduces the latest innovations in policies and autonomic computing and demonstrates how to put them to work in your organization. The authors cover the entire policy lifecycle: planning, definition, representation in standard policy languages, validation, distribution, enforcement, and more. They identify proven patterns for designing policy-enabled self-managing systems and show how policies can be integrated into a complete framework for system self management. They carefully introduce key technologies such as rules engines and the IBM Policy Management framework, as well as emerging standards such as the DMTF’s Common Information Model. Finally, they offer start-to-finish case studies of policy management in areas ranging from storage and IP networking to security. This book’s insights and practical guidance will be invaluable to every IT professional who can benefit from policies: architects, developers, administrators, researchers, and managers alike. Coverage includes Understanding the life cycle and components of policy-based self-managing systems Identifying your best opportunities to drive value from policies Defining the most appropriate abstraction level for your policies Using the DMTF’s Common Information Model to establish the logical structure and contents of policies Validating the consistency and appropriateness of your policies Making your policies automatically enforceable by computer Using policies to simplify and streamline configuration management for SANs and other IT systems Improving availability by implementing policies that can automatically react to faults and error conditions