Quartermaster: A Resource Utility System

Enterprise IT continues to be pressured to produce higher productivity, increased agility, and measurable results. This leads to consolidation into fewer data centers and "utilification" in which shared pools of resources are dynamically provisioned as needed to match business needs. Toward these ends, we have developed the Quartermaster resource utility system. All entities within Quartermaster are represented by models, and the state of the models is governed by policies which declare both the constraints on model values as well as desired future states. In this talk, I'll describe the modeling approach used in Quartermaster, how policies are integrated with the models, and how these foundations allow us to easily extend Quartermaster to support new resource types and management functionality.
Jim Pruyne is a Sr. Research Scientist in the Enterprise Systems and Software Laboratory of Hewlett-Packard Labs. His current research focuses on management of enterprise data center resources. He is also one of the chairs of the Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol (GRAAP) Working Group in the Global Grid Forum. Prior to joining HP Labs in 1996, he completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a member of the Condor research group.