Case study: applying management policies to manage distributed queuing systems

The increasing deployment of workstations and high performance endsystems in addition to the operation of mainframe computers leads to a situation where many companies can no longer afford for their expensive workstations to run idle for long hours during the night or with little load during daytime. Distributed queuing systems and batch systems (DQSs) provide an efficient basis to make use of these unexploited resources and allow corporations to replace expensive supercomputers with clustered workstations running DQSs. To employ these innovative DQSs on a large scale, the management policies for scheduling jobs, configuring queues, etc must be integrated in the overall management process for the IT infrastructure. For this purpose, the concepts of application management and management policies are introduced and discussed. The definition, automatic transformation, and implementation of policies on management platforms to effectively manage DQSs will show that policy-based application management is already possible using the existing management functionality found in today's systems.