BDIM-Based Optimal Enterprise IT Infrastructure Design In Multi-SLA Environments

The main function of IT service providers is to construct IT infrastructure of certain size and provide enterprise-level services for clients. Their work content is to maintain the IT services requested by customers by minimizing human and material resources. Therefore, IT infrastructure construction plays a pivotal role in the maximization of IT service providers'business profits. At early time, IT infrastructure construction concentrated on IT metrics exclusively, such as IT service availability, delay, jitter and so on. Generally, all of these technical parameters are stated in articles of Service Level Objects (SLOs), which can be found in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between service providers and clients.As IT services relate well with business values, we expect that IT service providers could evaluate business impacts besides giving technical standards. For example, IT service providers need to calculate business losses when their infrastructures are unavailable. Compared with traditional technical features, this business calculation can better help executive leaders make important decisions, since business values are easier to understand. In this background, Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM) receives extensive attention from both the academia and the industry. The basic goal of BDIM is to build the direct relationship between IT infrastructure and business impacts, find the right method of calculating business values accurately, and evaluate business profits as early as the period of infrastructure construction, which will help IT service providers choose the best solution. In this dissertation paper, we reviewed the development history of BDIM, analyzed the current research situation and gave the broadly-accepted concept. After that, we applied BDIM in a videoconferencing service scenario and analyzed the technical parameters (availability and delay). The multi-SLA loads'characteristics were also discussed. We proposed a method which can minimize the costs and business losses of videoconferencing service and testified it under a practical instance. Based on this, we extended the videoconferencing service to a more broad scenario-the cloud computing services. We discussed several kinds of cloud computing architectures and analyzed the dependencies among their components. By merging BDIM with cloud computing service architecture, we built its availability model and proposed a methodology which can minimize the summation; of infrastructure costs and business losses. By applying our method in a practical scenario, we proved its accuracy and effectiveness.Finally, we discussed a few current challenges in BDIM realm briefly and pointed out possible directions for endeavors, which offers valuable trains of thoughts.