Patent Application
20090171708
This invention relates, in general, to managing customer environments to provide support for business resiliency, and in particular, to facilitating creation of workflows used in managing the environments.
Today, customers attempt to manually manage and align their availability management with their information technology (IT) infrastructure. Changes in either business needs or the underlying infrastructure are often not captured in a timely manner and require considerable rework, leading to an inflexible environment.
Often high availability solutions and disaster recovery technologies are handled via a number of disparate point products that target specific scopes of failure, platforms or applications. Integrating these solutions into an end-to-end solution is a complex task left to the customer, with results being either proprietary and very specific, or unsuccessful.
Customers do not have the tools and infrastructure in place to customize their availability management infrastructure to respond to failures in a way that allows for a more graceful degradation of their environments. As a result, more drastic and costly actions may be taken (such as a site switch) when other options (such as disabling a set of applications or users) could have been offered, depending on business needs.
Coordination across availability management and other systems management disciplines is either nonexistent or accomplished via non-reusable, proprietary, custom technology.
There is little predictability as to whether the desired recovery objective will be achieved, prior to time of failure. There are only manual, labor intensive techniques to connect recovery actions with the business impact of failures and degradations.
Any change in the underlying application, technologies, business recovery objectives, resources or their interrelationships require a manual assessment of impact to the hand-crafted recovery scheme.
Based on the foregoing, a need exists for a capability to facilitate management of an IT environment. In particular, a need exists for a capability that facilitates the creation of workflows used in managing the environment.
The shortcomings of the prior art are overcome and additional advantages are provided through the provision of a computer-implemented method to facilitate creation of workflows. The method includes, for instance, obtaining a template to be used in creating a workflow, the template representing a pattern of resources, relationships and operations of an Information Technology (IT) environment; and programmatically creating the workflow using the template.
Computer program products and systems relating to one or more aspects of the present invention are also described and claimed herein.
Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniques of the present invention. Other embodiments and aspects of the invention are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed invention.
One or more aspects of the present invention are particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed as examples in the claims at the conclusion of the specification. The foregoing and other objects, features, and advantages of the invention are apparent from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:
In managing a customer's environment, such as its business environment, there is a set of requirements unaddressed by existing technology, which causes unpredictable down time, large impact failures and recoveries, and significant extra labor cost, with resulting loss of business revenue. These requirements include, for instance:
The above set of requirements is addressed, however, by a Business Resiliency (BR) Management System, of which one or more aspects of the present invention are included. The Business Resiliency Management System provides, for instance:
One goal of the BR system is to allow customers to align their supporting information technology systems with their business goals for handling failures of various scopes, and to offer a continuum of recovery services from finer grained process failures to broader scoped site outages. The BR system is built around the idea of identifying the components that constitute a business function, and identifying successive levels of recovery that lead to more complex constructs as the solution evolves. The various recovery options are connected by an overall BR management capability that is driven by policy controls.
Various characteristics of one embodiment of a BR system include:
A Business Resilience System is capable of being incorporated in and used by many types of environments. One example of a processing environment to incorporate and use aspects of a BR system, including one or more aspects of the present invention, is described with reference to
Processing environment 100 includes, for instance, a central processing unit (CPU) 102 coupled to memory 104 and executing an operating system 106. Examples of operating systems include AIX® and z/OS®, offered by International Business Machines Corporation; Linux; etc. AIX® and z/OS® are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., U.S.A. Other names used herein may be registered trademarks, trademarks or product names of International Business Machines Corporation or other companies.
The operating system manages execution of a Business Resilience Runtime Component 108 of a Business Resilience System, described herein, and one or more applications 110 of an application container 112.
As examples, processing environment 100 includes an IBM® System z™ processor or a pSeries® server offered by International Business Machines Corporation; a Linux server; or other servers, processors, etc. Processing environment 100 may include more, less and/or different components than described herein. (pSeries® is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., USA.)
Another example of a processing environment to incorporate and use aspects of a BR System, including one or more aspects of the present invention, is described with reference to
As shown, a processing environment 200 includes for instance, a central processing complex 202 coupled to an input/output (I/O) subsystem 204. Central processing complex 202 includes, for instance, a central processing unit 206, memory 208, an operating system 210, a database management system 212, a Business Resilience Runtime Component 214, an application container 216 including one or more applications 218, and an I/O facility 220.
I/O facility 220 couples central processing complex 202 to I/O subsystem 204 via, for example, a dynamic switch 230. Dynamic switch 230 is coupled to a control unit 232, which is further coupled to one or more I/O devices 234, such as one or more direct access storage devices (DASD).
Processing environments 100 and/or 200 may include, in other embodiments, more, less and/or different components.
In yet another embodiment, a central processing complex 300 (
For example, network service 302 of central processing complex 300 is coupled to a switch 308 of network subsystem 306. Switch 308 is coupled to a switch 310 via routers 312 and firewalls 314. Switch 310 is further coupled to a network service 316 of processing environment 304.
Processing environment 304 further includes, for instance, a central processing unit 320, a memory 322, an operating system 324, and an application container 326 including one or more applications 328. In other embodiments, it can include more, less and/or different components.
Moreover, CPC 300 further includes, in one embodiment, a central processing unit 330, a memory 332, an operating system 334, a database management system 336, a Business Resilience Runtime Component 338, an application container 340 including one or more applications 342, and an I/O facility 344. It also may include more, less and/or different components.
I/O facility 344 is coupled to a dynamic switch 346 of an I/O subsystem 347. Dynamic switch 346 is further coupled to a control unit 348, which is coupled to one or more I/O devices 350.
Although examples of various environments are provided herein, these are only examples. Many variations to the above environments are possible and are considered within the scope of the present invention.
In the above-described environments, a Business Resilience Runtime Component of a Business Resilience System is included. Further details associated with a Business Resilience Runtime Component and a Business Resilience System are described with reference to
In one example, a Business Resilience System 400 is a component that represents the management of recovery operations and configurations across an IT environment. Within that Business Resilience System, there is a Business Resilience Runtime Component (402) that represents the management functionality across multiple distinct Recovery Segments, and provides the service level automation and the support of creation of the recovery sequences. In addition, there are user interface (404), administration (406), installation (408) and configuration template (410) components within the Business Resilience System that enable the administrative operations that are to be performed. Each of these components is described in further detail below.
Business Resilience Runtime Component 402 includes a plurality of components of the BR System that are directly responsible for the collection of observations, creation of PSEs, policy acceptance, validation, error detection, and formulation of recovery sequences. As one example, Business Resilience Runtime Component 402 includes the following components:
In addition to the Business Resilience Runtime Component of the BR system, the BR system includes the following components, previously mentioned above.
BR Admin Mailbox (406) (
BR Install Logic (408) (
Availability Configuration Templates (410):
The user interface, admin mailbox, install logic and/or template components can be part of the same computing unit executing BR Runtime or executed on one or more other distributed computing units.
To further understand the use of some of the above components and their interrelationships, the following example is offered. This example is only offered for clarification purposes and is not meant to be limiting in any way.
Referring to
As a result of these conditions leading up to runtime, the following subscriptions have already taken place:
These steps highlight one example of an error detection process:
In addition to the above, BR includes a set of design points that help in the understanding of the system. These design points include, for instance:
BR is targeted towards goal based policies—the customer configures his target availability goal, and BR determines the preparatory actions and recovery actions to achieve that goal (e.g., automatically).
Availability management of the IT infrastructure through goal based policy is introduced by this design. The BR system includes the ability to author and associate goal based availability policy with the resource Recovery Segments described herein. In addition, support is provided to decompose the goal policy into configuration settings, preparatory actions and runtime procedures in order to execute against the deployed availability goal. In one implementation of the BR system, the Recovery Time Objective (RTO—time to recover post outage) is a supported goal policy. Additional goal policies of data currency (e.g., Recovery Point Objective) and downtime maximums, as well as others, can also be implemented with the BR system. Recovery Segments provide the context for association of goal based availability policies, and are the scope for goal policy expression supported in the BR design. The BR system manages the RTO through an understanding of historical information, metrics, recovery time formulas (if available), and actions that affect the recovery time for IT resources.
RTO goals are specified by the customer at a Recovery Segment level and apportioned to the various component resources grouped within the RS. In one example, RTO goals are expressed as units of time intervals, such as seconds, minutes, and hours. Each RS can have one RTO goal per Pattern System Environment associated with the RS. Based on the metrics available from the IT resources, and based on observed history and/or data from the customer, the RTO goal associated with the RS is evaluated for achievability, taking into account which resources are able to be recovered in parallel.
Based on the RTO for the RS, a set of preparatory actions expressed as a workflow is generated. This preparatory workflow configures the environment or makes alterations in the current configuration, to achieve the RTO goal or to attempt to achieve the goal.
In terms of optimizing RTO, there are tradeoffs associated with the choices that are possible for preparatory and recovery actions. Optimization of recovery choice is performed by BR, and may include interaction at various levels of sophistication with IT resources. In some cases, BR may set specific configuration parameters that are surfaced by the IT resource to align with the stated RTO. In other cases, BR may request that an IT resource itself alter its management functions to achieve some portion of the overall RS RTO. In either case, BR aligns availability management of the IT resources contained in the RS with the stated RTO.
In this design, as one example, there is an approach to collecting the required or desired metrics data, both observed and key varying factors, system profile information that is slow or non-moving, as well as potential formulas that reflect a specific resource's use of the key factors in assessing and performing recovery and preparatory actions, historical data and system information. The information and raw metrics that BR uses to perform analysis and RTO projections are expressed as part of the IT resources, as resource properties. BR specific interpretations and results of statistical analysis of key factors correlated to recovery time are kept as BR Specific Management data (BRMD).
BR maintains specific information about the BR management of each resource pairing or relationship between resources. Information regarding the BR specific data for a resource pairing is kept by BR, including information such as ordering of operations across resources, impact assessment information, operation effect on availability state, constraint analysis of actions to be performed, effects of preparatory actions on resources, and requirements for resources to co-locate or anti-co-locate.
One feature of the BR function is the ability to identify the scope and impact of a failure. The BR design uses a Containment Region to identify the resources affected by an incident. The Containment Region is initially formed with a fairly tight restriction on the scope of impact, but is expanded on receiving errors related to the first incident. The impact and scope of the failure is evaluated by traversing the resource relationships, evaluating information on BR specific resource pairing information, and determining most current state of the resources impacted.
Various types of preparatory and recovery processes are formulated and in some cases, optionally initiated. Workflows used by BR are dynamically generated based on, for instance, customer requirements for RTO goal, based on actual scope of failure, and based on any configuration settings customers have set for the BR system.
A workflow includes one or more operations to be performed, such as Start CICS, etc. Each operation takes time to execute and this amount of time is learned based on execution of the workflows, based on historical data in the observation log or from customer specification of execution time for operations. The workflows formalize, in a machine readable, machine editable form, the operations to be performed.
In one example, the processes are generated into Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) compliant workflows with activities that are operations on IT resources or specified manual, human activities. For example, BRM automatically generates the workflows in BPEL. This automatic generation includes invoking routines to insert activities to build the workflow, or forming the activities and building the XML (Extensible Mark-Up Language). Since these workflows are BPEL standard compliant, they can be integrated with other BPEL defined workflows which may incorporate manual activities performed by the operations staff. These BR related workflows are categorized as follows, in one example:
Since the set of BR actions described above modify existing IT environments, visibility to the actions that are taken by BR prior to the actual execution is provided. To gain trust in the decisions and recommendations produced by BR, the BR System can run in ‘advisory mode’. As part of advisory mode, the possible actions that would be taken are constructed into a workflow, similar to what would be done to actually execute the processes. The workflows are then made visible through standard workflow authoring tooling for customers to inspect or modify. Examples of BPEL tooling include:
BR tooling spans the availability management lifecycle from definition of business objectives, IT resource selection, availability policy authoring and deployment, development and deployment of runtime monitors, etc. In one example, support for the following is captured in the tooling environment for the BR system:
The policy lifecycle for BR goal policies, such as RTO goals, includes, for example:
One of the points in determining operational state of a Recovery Segment is that this design allows for customers to configure a definition of specific ‘aggregated’ states, using properties of individual IT resources. A Recovery Segment is an availability management context, in one example, which may include a diverse set of IT resources.
The customer may provide the rules logic used within the Recovery Segment to consume the relevant IT resource properties and determine the overall state of the RS (available, degraded and unavailable, etc). The customer can develop and deploy these rules as part of the Recovery Segment availability policy. For example, if there is a database included in the Recovery Segment, along with the supporting operating system, storage, and network resources, a customer may configure one set of rules that requires that the database must have completed the recovery of in-flight work in order to consider the overall Recovery Segment available. As another example, customers may choose to configure a definition of availability based on transaction rate metrics for a database, so that if the rate falls below some value, the RS is considered unavailable or degraded, and evaluation of ‘failure’ impact will be triggered within the BR system. Using these configurations, customers can tailor both the definitions of availability, as well as the rapidity with which problems are detected, since any IT resource property can be used as input to the aggregation, not just the operational state of IT resources.
Failures occurring during sequences of operations executed within a BPEL compliant process workflow are intended to be handled through use of BPEL declared compensation actions, associated with the workflow activities that took a failure. The BR System creates associated “undo” workflows that are then submitted to compensate, and reset the environment to a stable state, based on where in the workflow the failure occurred.
The following set of customer values, as examples, are derived from the BR system functions described above, listed here with supporting technologies from the BR system:
Management of the IT environment is adaptively performed, as described herein and in a U.S. patent application Ser. No. “Adaptive Business Resiliency Computer System for Information Technology Environments,” (POU920070364US1), Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Many different sequences of activities can be undertaken in creating a BR environment. The following represents one possible sequence; however, many other sequences are possible. This sequence is provided merely to facilitate an understanding of a BR system and one or more aspects of the present invention. This sequence is not meant to be limiting in any way. In the following description, reference is made to various U.S. patent applications, which are co-filed herewith.
On receiving the BR and related product offerings, an installation process is undertaken. Subsequent to installation of the products, a BR administrator may define the configuration for BR manager instances with the aid of BRM configuration templates.
Having defined the BRM configuration a next step could be to define Recovery Segments as described in “Recovery Segments for Computer Business Applications,” (POU920070108US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Definition of a RS may use a representation of resources in a topology graph as described in “Use of Graphs in Managing Computing Environments,” (POU920070112US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
It is expected that customers will enable BR operation in “observation” mode for a period of time to gather information regarding key metrics and operation execution duration associated with resources in a RS.
At some point, sufficient observation data will have been gathered or a customer may have sufficient knowledge of the environment to be managed by BR. A series of activities may then be undertaken to prepare the RS for availability management by BR. As one example, the following steps may be performed iteratively.
A set of functionally equivalent resources may be defined as described in “Use of Redundancy Groups in Runtime Computer Management of Business Applications,” (POU920070113US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Specification of the availability state for individual resources, redundancy groups and Recovery Segments may be performed as described in “Use of Multi-Level State Assessment in Computer Business Environments,” (POU920070114US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Representations for the IT environment in which BR is to operate may be created from historical information captured during observation mode, as described in “Computer Pattern System Environment Supporting Business Resiliency,” (POU920070107US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. These definitions provide the context for understanding how long it takes to perform operations which change the configuration—especially during recovery periods.
Information on relationships between resources may be specified based on recommended best practices—expressed in templates—or based on customer knowledge of their IT environment as described in “Conditional Computer Runtime Control of an Information Technology Environment Based on Pairing Constructs,” (POU920070110US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Pairing processing provides the mechanism for reflecting required or desired order of execution for operations, the impact of state change for one resource on another, the effect execution of an operation is expected to have on a resource state, desire to have one subsystem located on the same system as another and the effect an operation has on preparing the environment for availability management.
With preliminary definitions in place, a next activity of the BR administrator might be to define the goals for availability of the business application represented by a Recovery Segment as described in “Programmatic Validation in an Information Technology Environment,” (POU920070111 US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Managing the IT environment to meet availability goals includes having the BR system prioritize internal operations. The mechanism utilized to achieve the prioritization is described in “Serialization in Computer Management,” (POU920070105US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Multiple operations are performed to prepare an IT environment to meet a business application's availability goal or to perform recovery when a failure occurs. The BR system creates workflows to achieve the required or desired ordering of operations, as described in “Dynamic Generation of Processes in Computing Environments,” (POU920070123US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
A next activity in achieving a BR environment might be execution of the ordered set of operations used to prepare the IT environment, as described in “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment,” (POU920070117US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Management by BR to achieve availability goals may be initiated, which may initiate or continue monitoring of resources to detect changes in their operational state, as described in “Real-Time Information Technology Environments,” (POU920070120US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Monitoring of resources may have already been initiated as a result of “observation” mode processing.
Changes in resource or redundancy group state may result in impacting the availability of a business application represented by a Recovery Segment. Analysis of the environment following an error is performed. The analysis allows sufficient time for related errors to be reported, insures gathering of resource state completes in a timely manner and insures sufficient time is provided for building and executing the recovery operations—all within the recovery time goal, as described in “Management Based on Computer Dynamically Adjusted Discrete Phases of Event Correlation,” (POU920070119US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
A mechanism is provided for determining if events impacting the availability of the IT environment are related, and if so, aggregating the failures to optimally scope the outage, as described in “Management of Computer Events in a Computer Environment,” (POU920070118US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Ideally, current resource state can be gathered after scoping of a failure. However, provisions are made to insure management to the availability goal is achievable in the presence of non-responsive components in the IT environment, as described in “Managing the Computer Collection of Information in an Information Technology Environment,” (POU920070121 US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
With the outage scoped and current resource state evaluated, the BR environment can formulate an optimized recovery set of operations to meet the availability goal, as described in “Defining a Computer Recovery Process that Matches the Scope of Outage,” (POU920070124US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Formulation of a recovery plan is to uphold customer specification regarding the impact recovery operations can have between different business applications, as described in “Managing Execution Within a Computing Environment,” (POU920070115US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Varying levels of recovery capability exist with resources used to support a business application. Some resources possess the ability to perform detailed recovery actions while others do not. For resources capable of performing recovery operations, the BR system provides for delegation of recovery if the resource is not shared by two or more business applications, as described in “Conditional Actions Based on Runtime Conditions of a Computer System Environment,” (POU920070116US1), Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Having evaluated the outage and formulated a set of recovery operations, the BR system resumes monitoring for subsequent changes to the IT environment.
In support of mainline BR system operation, there are a number of activities including, for instance:
In order to build a BR environment that meets recovery time objectives, IT configurations within a customer's location are to be characterized and knowledge about the duration of execution for recovery time operations within those configurations is to be gained. IT configurations and the durations for operation execution vary by time, constituent resources, quantity and quality of application invocations, as examples. Customer environments vary widely in configuration of IT resources in support of business applications. Understanding the customer environment and the duration of operations within those environments aids in insuring a Recovery Time Objective is achievable and in building workflows to alter the customer configuration of IT resources in advance of a failure and/or when a failure occurs.
A characterization of IT configurations within a customer location is built by having knowledge of the key recovery time characteristics for individual resources (i.e., the resources that are part of the IT configuration being managed; also referred to as managed resources). Utilizing the representation for a resource, a set of key recovery time objective (RTO) metrics are specified by the resource owner. During ongoing operations, the BR manager gathers values for these key RTO metrics and gathers timings for the operations that are used to alter the configuration. It is expected that customers will run the BR function in “observation” mode prior to having provided a BR policy for availability management or other management. While executing in “observation” mode, the BR manager periodically gathers RTO metrics and operation execution durations from resource representations. The key RTO metrics properties, associated values and operation execution times are recorded in an Observation log for later analysis through tooling. Key RTO metrics and operation execution timings continue to be gathered during active BR policy management in order to maintain currency and iteratively refine data used to characterize customer IT configurations and operation timings within those configurations.
Examples of RTO properties and value range information by resource type are provided in the below table. It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that additional, less, and/or different resource types, properties and/or value ranges may be provided.
A specific example of key RTO properties for a z/OS® image is depicted in
The z/OS® image has a set of RTO metrics associated therewith, as described above. Other resources may also have its own set of metrics. An example of this is depicted in
Further, in one example, the RTO properties from each of the resources that are part of the Recovery Segment for App A have been gathered by BR and formed into an “observation” for recording to the Observation log, as depicted at 850.
Resources have varying degrees of functionality to support RTO goal policy. Such capacity is evaluated by BR, and expressed in resource property RTOGoalCapability in the BRMD entry for the resource. Two options for BR to receive information operation execution timings are: use of historical data or use of explicitly customer configured data. If BR relies on historical data to make recovery time projections, then before a statistically meaningful set of data is collected, this resource is not capable of supporting goal policy. A mix of resources can appear in a given RS—some have a set of observations that allow classification of the operation execution times, and others are explicitly configured by the customer.
Calculation of projected recovery time can be accomplished in two ways, depending on customer choice: use of historical observations or use of customers input timings. The following is an example of values for the RTOGoalCapability metadata that is found in the BRMD entry for the resource that indicates this choice:
If the customer is in observation mode, then historical information is captured, regardless of whether the customer has indicated use of explicitly input timings or use of historical information.
The administrator can alter, on a resource basis, which set of timings BR is to use. The default is to use historical observations. In particular, a change source of resource timing logic is provided that alters the source that BR uses to retrieve resource timings. The two options for retrieving timings are from observed histories or explicitly from admin defined times for operation execution. The default uses information from the observed histories, gathered from periodic polls. If the customer defines times explicitly, the customer can direct BR to use those times for a given resource. If activated, observation mode continues and captures information, as well as running averages, and standard deviations. The impact to this logic is to alter the source of information for policy validation and formulation of recovery plan.
With respect to the historical observations, there may be a statistically meaningful set of observations to verify. The sample size should be large enough so that a time range for each operation execution can be calculated, with a sufficient confidence interval. The acceptable number of observations to qualify as statistically meaningful, and the desired confidence interval are customer configurable using BR UI, but provided as defaults in the BRMD entry for the resource. The default confidence interval is 95%, in one example.
There are metrics from a resource that are employed by BR to enable and perform goal management. These include, for instance:
There is also a set of information about the resource that is employed—this information is provided as defaults in the BRMD entry for the resource, but provided to the BR team in the form of best practices information/defaults by the domain owners:
In addition to the resources defined herein as part of the IT configuration that is managed, there are other resources, referred to herein as assessed resources. Assessed resources are present primarily to provide observation data for PSE formation, and to understand impact(s) on managed resources. They do not have a decomposed RTO associated with them nor are they acted on for availability by BR. Assessed resources have the following characteristics, as examples:
Similarly, there are likely scenarios where a resource exists in a customer environment that already has an alternative availability management solution, and does not require BR for its availability. However, since other resources that are managed by BR may be dependent on them, they are observed and assessed in order to collect observation data and understand their impacts on managed resources. Additionally, there may be resources that do not have alternative management solutions, but the customer simply does not want them managed by BR, but other managed resources are dependent upon them. They too are classified as assessed resources.
These assessed resources share many of the same characteristics of managed resources, such as, for example:
Finally, there are a few restrictions that BR imposes upon assessed resources, in this embodiment:
To facilitate the building of the customer's IT configuration, observations regarding the customer's environment are gathered and stored in an observation log. In particular, the observation log is used to store observations gathered during runtime in customer environments, where each observation is a collection of various data points. They are created for each of the Recovery Segments that are in “observation” mode. These observations are used for numerous runtime and administrative purposes in the BR environment. As examples the observations are used:
BR gathers observations during runtime when “observation mode” is enabled at the Recovery Segment level. There are two means for enabling observation mode, as examples:
The administrator may also disable observation mode for a Recovery Segment, which stops it from polling for data and creating subsequent observation records for insertion in the log. However, the accumulated observation log is not deleted. In one example, an RS remains in observation mode throughout its lifecycle. The UI displays the implications of disabling observation mode.
In BR, the observations that are collected by BR during runtime can be grouped into two categories, as examples:
A periodic poll observation is a point-in-time snapshot of the constituent resources in a Recovery Segment. Observation data points are collected for those resources in the Recovery Segment(s) which have associated BR management data for any of the following reasons, as examples:
The full value of these observations is derived for an RS when they include data that has been gathered for its constituent resources, plus the resources that those are dependent upon. In one embodiment, the administrator is not forced to include all dependent resources when defining a Recovery Segment, and even if that were the case, there is nothing that prevents them from deleting various dependent resources. When defining a Recovery Segment, the BR UI provides an option that allows the customer to display the dependency graph for those resources already in the Recovery Segment. This displays the topology from the seed node(s) in the Recovery Segment down to and including the dependent leaf nodes. The purpose of this capability is to give the customer the opportunity to display the dependent nodes and recommend that they be included in the Recovery Segment.
Preparatory and recovery workflows are built by the BR manager to achieve the customer requested RTO policy based on resource operations timings. During active policy monitoring by the BR manager, measurements of achieved time for operations are recorded in observations to the log and used to maintain the running statistical data on operation execution times. Observations written to the log may vary in the contained resource RTO metrics and operation execution timings.
Observations are also collected from any of the BPEL workflows created by BR in the customer's environment. There is a standard template that each BR BPEL workflow uses. As part of that template, observation data is captured at the start of, during, and at the completion of each workflow. Specifically, in one example, one observation is created at the end of the workflow with data accumulated from completion of each activity. This information is used to gather timings for workflow execution for use in creating subsequent workflows at time of failure.
In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, a capability is provided that enables the use of templates to programmatically create workflows usable in managing aspects of a customer's environment.
Today's availability products typically encode information on best practice sequences and procedures for recovery either as part of the code or as proprietary scripts that need to be explicitly maintained by the customer. The problems with this approach include:
One or more of the above deficiencies are addressed by aspects of the present invention. Specifically, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention, a workflow template is used to dynamically and programmatically create one or more workflows. As an example, a set of availability management processes for IT resources is represented as a workflow template that encodes a set of best practices for the overall task. That template is then used to create a workflow. In one embodiment, the best practices are represented in standardized BPEL format.
One or more features of the present invention include, for instance:
In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, the following categories of templates are available:
In accordance with one implementation of the present invention, the templates are described in the form of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) compliant workflows. Today, best practices for availability management or other management goals, are typically encoded in proprietary format or even in plain text. The results of today's technology are large numbers of inconsistent practices that are not able to interrelate, or non-programmatic expressions which need to be encoded in some other manner for use by management software. Using a standardized workflow language for representing management best practice information allows multiple products and multiple vendors to contribute practices that can be related to each other. Skills within the customers' environment can be targeted toward a standard workflow language, rather than development of skills in single use, proprietary implementations.
A set of workflow templates representing best practices could be shipped as part of a product; however, customization of these templates is possible by the customer or a service provider. The templates are not part of a code base that requires alterations to be shipped by a vendor, such as IBM®. Customers or vendors can modify the templates to suit their business needs and use the modified templates as a base for applying to Recovery Segments, as an example. The customized templates can then be applied to the set of resources managed by the Recovery Segment, without requirements to alter the IBM® provided BR system software.
Over time, the set of best practices for managing an environment, including but not limited to, recovery and preparing the environment, will grow and change. Using a standardized template format, customers and vendors can contribute workflows to the overall framework, and ensure that these are used by IT management functions, such as that for Business Resiliency. The customer is not limited to a set of encoded best practices that are known at a given point in time, and is further not reliant on any one vendor to provide the updates to the templates.
The templates that are provided by the set of vendors applicable in a given customer environment can then be further combined and composed into a set that is tailored for individual business needs. Combinations of templates from different vendors, such as those that provide storage function and those that provide network function, can be combined to create an overall template that covers a larger scope of resource recovery situations.
Where scripts are deployed today to encode best practices, there is generally a high cost to services for the customer, or high labor cost internally to the customer to develop the scripts in a unique language. Further, there is ongoing services cost to maintain these scripts. Use of templates allows a more flexible methodology that is adaptable and easily customized, allowing customers to lessen their need for services or internal labor cost.
In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, workflow templates having the following characteristics, in one example:
One example of a Preparatory workflow template 900 for a storage subsystem is depicted in
As a further example, the same Preparatory workflow template is displayed in a BPEL editor, as shown in
A further example is depicted in
However, two-way interactions between the two panes are enabled so that specific resource types can be associated with specific BPEL tasks/activities. Also, when adding the BPEL activities for controlling the behavior of the workflow, the operations to be invoked on the resources and the properties to be used in pattern matching are added by selecting the resources and then right-clicking on them to bring up the list of settable properties and public operations.
Activities are the primitives that actually implement the workflow. In this example, there are two types of activities: basic and structured. Basic activities are primitive activities that do not include other activities, while structured activities allow conditions, grouping, and control flow. In the example described herein, the activities are BPEL activities; however, this is only one example. One or more aspect of the present invention can include other activities and can work with languages other than BPEL.
In the table provided below, various basic and structured BPEL activities used for BR are described. These are merely provided for the sake of understanding their semantics and how they are used in BR. This is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of the BPEL language constructs, nor are these meant to be normative descriptions. Further, these are not meant to limit the invention in any way. Again, BPEL is only one example. As examples, BPEL is described in Weerawarana, Sanjiva et al., Web Services Platform Architecture: SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-BPEL, WS-Reliable Messaging and More, ISBN-10: 0131488740, ISBN-13: 978-0131488748, Prentice Hall PTR, 2005; and Matjaz, B. Juric, Business Process Execution Language for Web Services BPEL and BPEL4WS, ISBN-10: 1904811817, ISBN-13: 978-1904811817, Packt Pub., 2nd Ed., 2006, each of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, many different types of workflow templates may be used. Examples of different kinds of workflow templates are described below. Since the logic is similar for the various workflow templates, the logic for one template, the Preparatory workflow template, is used as an example. This example, however, does not limit the scope of the claimed invention in any way.
A preparatory workflow configures, alters, or prepares a customer's IT environment configuration. Specifically, in one example, the preparatory workflow configures, alters or prepares the environment to achieve a goal policy (such as an availability goal, e.g., RTO), or to attempt to achieve the policy. One example of creating a preparatory workflow is described in a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment,” (POU920070117US1), Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. In one example, the BR administrator assigns a specific RTO goal policy to a Recovery Segment, and BR dynamically creates a preparatory workflow based on that policy and the constituent resources in the Recovery Segment. This may be accomplished with or without use of Preparatory workflow templates. With the optional use of Preparatory workflow templates, a preparatory workflow template is selected from a set of best practices preparatory workflow templates and then associated with the Recovery Segment for that specific goal policy. Alternatively, the BR administrator may select an existing Preparatory workflow template, alter it, and then associate the altered template to the Recovery Segment for that specific goal policy.
In the workflow templates, the identified resources of a template are resource types (not instances) and the relationship types (not instances) between those resource types. Resources may be represented in many ways, including, for example, as CIM compliant resources.
The Preparatory workflow templates represent well-known and well-understood best practices prepare workflows for a specific set of resources that may be applicable and/or desirable for the customer's business application (as represented by a Recovery Segment) and availability goal. The individual activities of the workflow are typically operations performed on the various IT resources in the Recovery Segment. Further, in this example, BPEL constructs are used to control the flow and sequence of those operations.
During the process of associating a preparatory workflow to a specific Recovery Segment using a workflow template, the template behavior can be customized (using, for instance, the BR Workflow Template Eclipse plugin) by, for example:
Pattern matching capabilities are also included as part of the BR Workflow Template Eclipse plugin. The Eclipse plugin queries the BR template datastore for the persisted Preparatory workflow templates and parses them when necessary or desired. These Preparatory workflow templates are stored in the template datastore at BR installation time, or when updated or added by customers or vendors. After a policy has been associated with a Recovery Segment, the template datastore is referenced to locate templates having resources and relationships of the same type as those in the Recovery Segment. The BR Administrator has the option to search on Preparatory workflow templates in order to look for pattern matches. On a large Recovery Segment, pattern matching may take a long time, so it may be desirable to categorize the templates based on constituent resource types in order to mitigate performance delays on the client. A progress indicator is also used to provide feedback to the customer.
When the pattern matching technique is complete, the BR Administrator receives a list of the preparatory workflow templates that matched the criteria. The BR Administrator is then able to select a template that was matched from that list and the nodes that were matched are highlighted on the UI. They can then easily associate the resource types in the workflow template to the specific resources in the Recovery Segment, have the resource references substituted into the workflow template, and the preparatory workflow created and deployed to, for instance, a BPEL compliant engine ready for invocation.
Using the BR UI, customers can view existing Preparatory workflow templates and derive new Preparatory workflow templates from any of the predefined templates provided by, for instance:
The allowed template syntax is enforced during modification. In the implementation selected, the vendor provided templates (e.g., from IBM® or other vendors) are not allowed to be directly modified, rather these can be derived into other templates which can then be modified. Other implementations may allow direct modification of vendor provided templates. It is also recommended that customers follow a common naming convention to indicate what template they have derived from, so as to be able to easily find their customized templates when there are service updates to the vendor provided templates.
After the BR Administrator modifies a Preparatory workflow template, they can search their environment's business applications for matches of their template pattern. Each match is displayed in the Eclipse search view and when double clicked, opens an editor displaying the nodes comprising the match.
An existing template may be displayed and altered in a manner similar to defining a template. Resource types (not instances) and relationship types (not instances) may be altered, added, and deleted; preparatory actions (on those resource types that support preparatory actions) can be altered, added, and deleted; and activities can be altered, added and deleted. Once the template is altered to their satisfaction they have the option of saving it with either the existing name (if it is not one of the predefined templates shipped with BR) or a new name of their choice. Finally, altering a Preparatory workflow template does not impact any instantiated workflows that were based on that template. The new template only affects new Preparatory workflows created with the template.
New Preparatory workflow templates may be created by customers for their specific business applications. The templates, whether shipped as part of BR, created and/or derived by customers, created by hardware and software vendors (to specify availability best practices for their own products), or provided by open-source providers, can then be executed with the pattern matching techniques in the BR UI space, and displayed from the BR UI. The templates are stored internally in the BR datastore and can be defined with the BR UI and the BR Workflow Template Eclipse plugin.
A BR Administrator is able to define new templates by selecting the “New Template” action. For the Preparatory workflow template, a set of resource types and their inter-relationship types that should be used for pattern searching are employed. The BR Administrator is presented with a new template editor to define the new template. Resources and relationships can be added to the editor by right-clicking.
In one implementation, the Preparatory workflow template expects a set of resource types and optional inter-relationships types (to be used for pattern searching purposes), as well as the activities to invoke operations and/or properties on those resources, and the activities to implement the behavior of the workflow (i.e., the sequence of operation invocation and flow of control). The BR Administrator has the option to associate the new Preparatory workflow template with an existing Recovery Segment template.
In one example, the BR Administrator is presented with a new workflow template editor to define the new Preparatory workflow template. Resources and relationships can be added to the workflow by right-clicking in the template editor background. When adding the activities for controlling the behavior of the workflow, operations to be invoked (or properties to be set) on the resources are added by selecting and then right-clicking on them to bring up the list of settable properties and public operations.
One example of defining a Preparatory workflow template is described with reference to
One example of using a Preparatory workflow template to create a Preparatory Workflow for a Recovery Segment (reflecting a business application) for which a goal policy has already been applied and validated is described with reference to
One embodiment of the pattern matching logic for selection of preparatory workflow templates which may be applicable to a specified RS is described with reference to
One embodiment of the logic to create a workflow from a template is described with reference to
In one example, this logic is invoked by the BR Administrator from the BR Workflow Template Eclipse plugin and performed by the UI to create a BPEL compliant workflow from a workflow template. The input to this logic is the cached workflow template and the associated Recovery Segment. The output is a deployed BPEL compliant workflow and updates to the appropriate DB2® tables.
An alternate implementation of this flow might entail using a pattern matching technique to match the resource instances in the Recovery Segment with the resource types in the workflow template at the time of invocation rather than beforehand. Furthermore, matching property values, including resource state can be performed, as well as matching on current runtime environment, as expressed in a PSE. This real-time substitution alternative might provide a more adaptive and generic solution for cases where resource instances in a customer's business application tend to change frequently.
Similar to prepare sequences as workflow templates, recovery sequences can be represented as workflow templates. Examples of recovery sequences for a set of resources within a given Recovery Segment can include information on the set of operations to recover storage when recovering to a synchronous copy of the data at a remote site with different connectivity. The operations may include those on storage elements, as well as on the connected servers and operating systems. This flow can be represented as a set of operations on resource types, where the actual resource instance addressing is determined when a recovery goal is activated for the Recovery Segment, or when the template is applied to the Recovery Segment independent of a goal being set.
Using templates for representing recovery actions avoids the problems that are seen in today's configurations where the recovery actions are part of proprietary scripts that invoke resource instance specific interfaces. When instances change, scripts must be individually located, and manually updated. Templates allows the flow to be represented in a way that is applied to, and adaptable to, the current environment, dynamically and programmatically.
Similar to prepare and recovery sequences as workflow templates, preventive sequences can be represented as workflow templates. One example of a preventive action is a fencing operation (e.g., isolation of access to a shared I/O resource) to isolate the failed resource and prevent further corruption of surviving resources. This flow can be represented as a set of operations on resource types, where the actual resource instance addressing is determined when a recovery goal is activated for the Recovery Segment, or when the template is applied to the Recovery Segment independent of a goal being set.
Using templates for representing preventive actions avoids the problems that are seen in today's configurations where the preventive actions are part of proprietary scripts that invoke resource instance specific interfaces. When instances change, scripts must be individually located, and manually updated. Templates allows the flow to be represented in a way that is applied to, and adaptable to, the current environment, dynamically and programmatically.
Similar to recovery sequences as workflow templates, return sequences can be represented as workflow templates. These flows can be represented as a set of operations on resource types, where the actual resource instance addressing is determined when a recovery goal is activated for the Recovery Segment, or when the template is applied to the Recovery Segment independent of a goal being set.
Using templates for representing return actions avoids the problems that are seen in today's configurations where the return actions are part of proprietary scripts that invoke resource instance specific interfaces. When instances change, scripts must be individually located, and manually updated. Templates allows the flow to be represented in a way that is applied to, and adaptable to, the current environment, dynamically and programmatically.
Similar to prepare sequences as workflow templates, undo sequences can be represented as workflow templates. These flows can be represented as a set of operations on resource types, where the actual resource instance addressing is determined when a recovery goal is activated for the Recovery Segment, or when the template is applied to the Recovery Segment independent of a goal being set.
Using templates for representing undo actions avoids the problems that are seen in today's configurations where the return actions are part of proprietary scripts that invoke resource instance specific interfaces. When instances change, scripts must be individually located, and manually updated. Templates allows the flow to be represented in a way that is applied to, and adaptable to, the current environment, dynamically and programmatically.
Described in detail herein is a capability for using templates to programmatically create workflows. The templates are obtained (e.g., have, defined, created, provided, received, retrieved) and used to create workflows. The templates have conditional logic enabling workflows to be created based on the current environment.
One or more aspects of the present invention can be included in an article of manufacture (e.g., one or more computer program products) having, for instance, computer usable media. The media has therein, for instance, computer readable program code means or logic (e.g., instructions, code, commands, etc.) to provide and facilitate the capabilities of the present invention. The article of manufacture can be included as a part of a computer system or sold separately.
One example of an article of manufacture or a computer program product incorporating one or more aspects of the present invention is described with reference to
A sequence of program instructions or a logical assembly of one or more interrelated modules defined by one or more computer readable program code means or logic direct the performance of one or more aspects of the present invention.
Advantageously, a capability is provided for programmatically creating workflows from templates. The use of templates enables workflows to be created, based on best practices and evaluated dynamically based on current runtime conditions. This reduces cost and increases flexibility.
As used herein, obtaining (e.g., obtaining the template) includes, for instance, creating (e.g., from scratch or from a provided template); defining; having; receiving; retrieving; being provided; providing; modifying; deriving from pattern matching against a template; received, provided, etc. from customers, vendors, open-source providers, etc.; composition from any source(s) of templates to create a larger template; etc.
Although various embodiments are described above, these are only examples. For example, the processing environments described herein are only examples of environments that may incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention. Environments may include other types of processing units or servers or the components in each processing environment may be different than described herein. Each processing environment may include additional, less and/or different components than described herein. Further, the types of central processing units and/or operating systems or other types of components may be different than described herein. Again, these are only provided as examples.
Moreover, an environment may include an emulator (e.g., software or other emulation mechanisms), in which a particular architecture or subset thereof is emulated. In such an environment, one or more emulation functions of the emulator can implement one or more aspects of the present invention, even though a computer executing the emulator may have a different architecture than the capabilities being emulated. As one example, in emulation mode, the specific instruction or operation being emulated is decoded, and an appropriate emulation function is built to implement the individual instruction or operation.
In an emulation environment, a host computer includes, for instance, a memory to store instructions and data; an instruction fetch unit to obtain instructions from memory and to optionally, provide local buffering for the obtained instruction; an instruction decode unit to receive the instruction fetched and to determine the type of instructions that have been fetched; and an instruction execution unit to execute the instructions. Execution may include loading data into a register for memory; storing data back to memory from a register; or performing some type of arithmetic or logical operation, as determined by the decode unit. In one example, each unit is implemented in software. For instance, the operations being performed by the units are implemented as one or more subroutines within emulator software.
Further, a data processing system suitable for storing and/or executing program code is usable that includes at least one processor coupled directly or indirectly to memory elements through a system bus. The memory elements include, for instance, local memory employed during actual execution of the program code, bulk storage, and cache memory which provide temporary storage of at least some program code in order to reduce the number of times code must be retrieved from bulk storage during execution.
Input/Output or I/O devices (including, but not limited to, keyboards, displays, pointing devices, DASD, tape, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and other memory media, etc.) can be coupled to the system either directly or through intervening I/O controllers. Network adapters may also be coupled to the system to enable the data processing system to become coupled to other data processing systems or remote printers or storage devices through intervening private or public networks. Modems, cable modems, and Ethernet cards are just a few of the available types of network adapters.
Further, although the environments described herein are related to the management of availability of a customer's environment, one or more aspects of the present invention may be used to manage aspects other than or in addition to availability. Further, one or more aspects of the present invention can be used in environments other than a business resiliency environment.
Yet further, many examples are provided herein, and these examples may be revised without departing from the spirit of the present invention. For example, in one embodiment, the description is described in terms of availability and recovery; however, other goals and/or objectives may be specified in lieu of or in addition thereto. Additionally, the resources may be other than IT resources. Further, there may be references to particular products offered by International Business Machines Corporation or other companies. These again are only offered as examples, and other products may also be used. Additionally, although tables and databases are described herein, any suitable data structure may be used. There are many other variations that can be included in the description described herein and all of these variations are considered a part of the claimed invention.
Further, for completeness in describing one example of an environment in which one or more aspects of the present invention may be utilized, certain components and/or information is described that is not needed for one or more aspects of the present invention. These are not meant to limit the aspects of the present invention in any way.
One or more aspects of the present invention can be provided, offered, deployed, managed, serviced, etc. by a service provider who offers management of customer environments. For instance, the service provider can create, maintain, support, etc. computer code and/or a computer infrastructure that performs one or more aspects of the present invention for one or more customers. In return, the service provider can receive payment from the customer under a subscription and/or fee agreement, as examples. Additionally or alternatively, the service provider can receive payment from the sale of advertising content to one or more third parties.
In one aspect of the present invention, an application can be deployed for performing one or more aspects of the present invention. As one example, the deploying of an application comprises providing computer infrastructure operable to perform one or more aspects of the present invention.
As a further aspect of the present invention, a computing infrastructure can be deployed comprising integrating computer readable code into a computing system, in which the code in combination with the computing system is capable of performing one or more aspects of the present invention.
As yet a further aspect of the present invention, a process for integrating computing infrastructure, comprising integrating computer readable code into a computer system may be provided. The computer system comprises a computer usable medium, in which the computer usable medium comprises one or more aspects of the present invention. The code in combination with the computer system is capable of performing one or more aspects of the present invention.
The capabilities of one or more aspects of the present invention can be implemented in software, firmware, hardware, or some combination thereof. At least one program storage device readable by a machine embodying at least one program of instructions executable by the machine to perform the capabilities of the present invention can be provided.
The flow diagrams depicted herein are just examples. There may be many variations to these diagrams or the steps (or operations) described therein without departing from the spirit of the invention. For instance, the steps may be performed in a differing order, or steps may be added, deleted, or modified. All of these variations are considered a part of the claimed invention.
Although embodiments have been depicted and described in detail herein, it will be apparent to those skilled in the relevant art that various modifications, additions, substitutions and the like can be made without departing from the spirit of the invention and these are therefore considered to be within the scope of the invention as defined in the following claims.
