Non-disruptively changing a computing environment

Abstract

A change to a goal specified for an IT environment is to be made. Responsive to the changed goal, the IT environment is changed. This change is performed non-disruptively. Further, during the change, management to the existing goal is continued.

Description

TECHNICAL FIELD

This invention relates, in general, to managing customer environments to provide support for business resiliency, and in particular, to non-disruptively changing the environment based on detected changes in management policy.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

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.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

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 enables the environment to be changed non-disruptively, in response to detected changes in management policy.

The shortcomings of the prior art are overcome and additional advantages are provided through the provision of a computer-implemented method to manage changes within an Information Technology environment. The method includes, for instance, determining one or more changes to be made to the IT environment, in response to a change in goal associated with a business application of the IT environment; and non-disruptively effecting the one or more changes to be made to the IT environment, wherein the non-disruptively effecting comprises continuing to manage to an existing goal of the business application.

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.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

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:

FIG. 1 depicts one embodiment of a processing environment to incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention;

FIG. 2 depicts another embodiment of a processing environment to incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention;

FIG. 3 depicts yet a further embodiment of a processing environment to incorporate and use one or more aspects of the present invention;

FIG. 4 depicts one embodiment of a Business Resilience System used in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 5A depicts one example of a screen display of a business resilience perspective, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 5B depicts one example of a screen display of a Recovery Segment, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 6A depicts one example of a notification view indicating a plurality of notifications, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 6B depicts one example of a notification message sent to a user, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 7 depicts one example of a Recovery Segment of the Business Resilience System of FIG. 4, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 8A depicts examples of key Recovery Time Objective properties for a particular resource, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 8B depicts one example in which Recovery Time Objective properties collectively form an observation of a Pattern System Environment, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIGS. 9A-9C depict one embodiment of the logic to manage a non-disruptive goal policy change, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIGS. 10A-10B depict one embodiment of the logic to generate a delta workflow used in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; and

FIG. 11 depicts one embodiment of a computer program product incorporating one or more aspects of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

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:

• • 1. Ensuring that there is a consistent recovery scheme across the environment, linked to the business application, across the different types of resources; not a different methodology performed by platform silo. The recovery is to match the scope of the business application, not limited in scope to a single platform. The recovery is to be end-to-end and allow for interaction across multiple vendor products. In one example, a business application is defined as a process that is supported by IT services. It is supportive of the products and/or services created by a customer. It can be of fine granularity (e.g., a specific service/product provided) or of coarse granularity (e.g., a group of services/products provided).
  • 2. Ability to group together mixed resource types (servers, storage, applications, subsystems, network, etc.) into logical groupings aligned with business processes requirements for availability.
  • 3. Ability to share resources across logical groups of resources; ability to nest these logical group definitions, with specifications for goal policy accepted and implemented at each level.
  • 4. Pre-specified recommendations for resource groupings, with customization possible, and pattern matching customer configuration with vendor or customer provided groupings/relationships—to avoid requiring customers to start from scratch for definitions.
  • 5. Ability to group together redundant resources with functional equivalence—use during validation when customer has less redundancy than required to meet the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) goal; in recovery to select an alternate resource for one that has failed.
  • 6. Ability to configure the definition of what constitutes available, degraded, or unavailable based on customer's own sensitivity for a given grouping of resources, and business needs, and further aggregate the state across various resources to produce an overall state for the business application. The state is to be assessed real time, based on what is actually occurring in the system at the time, rather than fixed definitions. In some cases, a performance slowdown might flag a degraded environment, and in other cases, a failure may be necessary before flagging a degraded or unavailable environment. The definitions of available, degraded and unavailable are to be consumed by an availability system that evaluates them in the context of a policy, and then determines appropriate action, including possibly launching recovery automatically.
  • 7. Ability to relate the redundancy capability of relevant resources to the availability status of a business application.
  • 8. Allow customers to configure when recovery actions can be delegated to lower level resources, particularly since resource sharing is becoming more relevant in many customer environments.
  • 9. Include customer or vendor best practices for availability as prespecified workflows, expressed in a standards based manner, that can be customized.
  • 10. Ability to specify quantitative business goals for the recovery of logical groupings of resources, effecting both how the resources are pre-configured for recovery, as well as recovered during errors. One such quantitative goal is Recovery Time Objective (RTO). As part of the specification of quantitative business goals, to be able to include time bias of applications, and facilitate the encoding of appropriate regulatory requirements for handling of certain workloads during changing business cycles in selected businesses, such as financial services.
  • 11. Decomposition of the overall quantified RTO goal to nested logical groups; processing for shared groups having different goals.
  • 12. Ability to configure redundancy groupings and co-location requirements with resources from other vendors, using a representation for resources (which may be, for example, standards based), with ability to clearly identify the vendor as part of the resource definition.
  • 13. Ability to use customer's own historical system measures to automatically generate various system environments, then use these system environments when specifying quantitative recovery goals (since recovery time achievability and requirements are not consistent across time of day, business cycle, etc.). The function is to be able to incorporate historical information from dependent resources, as part of the automatic generation of system environments.
  • 14. Specification of statistical thresholds for acceptability of using historical information; customer specification directly of expected operation times and directive to use customer specified values.
  • 15. Environments are matched to IT operations and time of day, with automatic processing under a new system environment at time boundaries—no automatic internal adjustment of RTO is to be allowed, rather changed if the customer has specified that a different RTO is needed for different system environments.
  • 16. Goal Validation—Prior to failure time. Ability to see assessment of achievable recovery time, in, for instance, a Gantt chart like manner, detailing what is achievable for each resource and taking into account overlaps of recovery sequences, and differentiating by system environment. Specific use can be during risk assessments, management requests for additional recovery related resources, mitigation plans for where there are potentials for RTO miss. Example customer questions:
    • What is my expected recovery time for a given application during “end of month close” system environment?
    • What is the longest component of that recovery time?
    • Can I expect to achieve the desired RTO during the “market open” for stock exchange or financial services applications?
    • What would be the optimal sequence and parallelization of recovery for the resources used by my business application?
  • 17. Ability to prepare the environment to meet the desired quantitative business goals, allowing for tradeoffs when shared resources are involved. Ensure that both automated and non-automated tasks can be incorporated into the pre-conditioning. Example of customer question: What would I need to do for pre-conditioning my system to support the RTO goal I need to achieve for this business application?
  • 18. Ability to incorporate operations from any vendors' resources for pre-conditioning or recovery workflows, including specification of which pre-conditioning operations have effect on recoveries, which operations have dependencies on others, either within vendor resources or across resources from multiple vendors.
  • 19. Customer ability to modify pre-conditioning workflows, consistent with supported operations on resources.
  • 20. Ability to undo pre-conditioning actions taken, when there is a failure to complete a transactionally consistent set of pre-conditioning actions; recognize the failure, show customers the optional workflow to undo the actions taken, allow them to decide preferred technique for reacting to the failure—manual intervention, running undo set of operations, combination of both, etc.
  • 21. Ability to divide pre-conditioning work between long running and immediate, nondisruptive short term actions.
  • 22. Impact only the smallest set of resources required during recovery, to avoid negative residual or side effects for attempting to recover a broader set of resources than what is actually impacted by the failure.
  • 23. Choosing recovery operations based on determination of which recovery actions address the minimal impact, to meet goal, and then prepare for subsequent escalation in event of failure of initial recovery actions.
  • 24. Choosing a target for applications and operating systems (OS), based on customer co-location specifications, redundancy groups, and realtime system state.
  • 25. Ability for customer to indicate specific effect that recovery of a given business process can have on another business process—to avoid situations where lower priority workloads are recovered causing disruption to higher priority workloads; handling situations where resources are shared.
  • 26. Ability to prioritize ongoing recovery processing over configuration changes to an availability system, and over any other administration functions required for the availability system.
  • 27. Ability for recoveries and pre-conditioning actions to run as entire transactions so that partial results are appropriately accounted for and backed out or compensated, based on actual effect (e.g., during recovery time or even pre-conditioning, not all actions may succeed, so need to preserve a consistent environment).
  • 28. Allow for possible non-responsive resources or underlying infrastructure that does not have known maximum delays in response time in determining recovery actions, while not going beyond the allotted recovery time.
  • 29. Allow customer to change quantified business recovery goals/targets without disruption to the existing recovery capability, with appropriate labeling of version of the policy to facilitate interaction with change management systems.
  • 30. Allow customers to change logical groupings of resources that have assigned recovery goals, without disruption to the existing recovery capability, with changes versioned to facilitate interaction with change management systems.
  • 31. Ability to specify customizable human tasks, with time specifications that can be incorporated into the goal achievement validation so customers can understand the full time involved for a recovery and where focusing on IT and people time is critical to reducing RTO.
  • 32. There is a requirement/desire to implement dynamically modified redundancy groupings for those resources which are high volume—automatic inclusion based on a specified set of characteristics and a matching criteria.
  • 33. There is a requirement/desire to automatically add/delete resources from the logical resource groupings for sets of resources that are not needing individual assessment.

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:

• • 1. Rapid identification of fault scope.
    • Correlation and identification of dependencies between business functions and the supporting IT resources.
    • Impact analysis of failures affecting business functions, across resources used within the business functions, including the applications and data.
    • Isolation of failure scope to smallest set of resources, to ensure that any disruptive recovery actions effect only the necessary resources.
  • 2. Rapid granular and graceful degradation of IT service.
    • Discontinuation of services based on business priorities.
    • Selection of alternate resources at various levels may include selection of hardware, application software, data, etc.
    • Notifications to allow applications to tailor or reduce service consumption during times of availability constraints.
  • 3. Integration of availability management with normal business operations and other core business processes.
    • Policy controls for availability and planned reconfiguration, aligned with business objectives.
    • Encapsulation, integration of isolated point solutions into availability IT fabric, through identification of affected resources and operations initiated by the solutions, as well as business resiliency.
    • Goal based policy support, associated with Recovery Segments that may be overlapped or nested in scope.
    • Derivation of data currency requirements, based on business availability goals.

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:

• • 1. Capability for dynamic generation of recovery actions, into a programmatic and manageable entity.
  • 2. Dynamic generation of configuration changes required/desired to support a customer defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) goal.
  • 3. Dynamic definition of key Pattern System Environments (PSEs) through statistical analysis of historical observations.
  • 4. Validation of whether requested RTO goals are achievable, based on observed historical snapshots of outages or customer specified recovery operation time duration, in the context of key Pattern System Environments.
  • 5. BR system dynamic, automatic generation and use of standards based Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) workflows to specify recovery transactions and allow for customer integration through workflow authoring tools.
  • 6. Ability to configure customized scopes of recovery, based on topologies of resources and their relationships, called Recovery Segments (RSs).
  • 7. Best practice workflows for configuration and recovery, including, but not limited to, those for different resource types: servers, storage, network, and middleware, as examples.
  • 8. Ability to customize the definition of available, degraded, unavailable states for Recovery Segments.
  • 9. Ability to represent customers' recommended configurations via best practice templates.
  • 10. Ability to define the impact that recovery of one business application is allowed to have on other business applications.
  • 11. Ability to correlate errors from the same or multiple resources into related outages and perform root cause analysis prior to initiating recovery actions.
  • 12. Quantified policy driven, goal oriented management of unplanned outages.
  • 13. Groupings of IT resources that have associated, consistent recovery policy and recovery actions, classified as Recovery Segments.
  • 14. Handling of situations where the underlying error detection and notifications system itself is unavailable.

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 FIG. 1.

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 FIG. 2.

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 (FIG. 3) further includes a network service 302, which is used to couple a central processing complex 300 to a processing environment 304 via a network subsystem 306.

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 FIG. 4.

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:

• • 1. One or more Business Resilience Managers (BRM) (412).
    • The Business Resilience Manager (BRM) is the primary component containing logic to detect potential errors in the IT environment, perform assessment to find resources causing errors, and formulate recovery sequences to reestablish the desired state for resources for all Recovery Segments that may be impacted.
    • The Business Resilience Manager is a component of which there can be one or more. It manages a set of Recovery Segments, and has primary responsibility to formulate recovery sequences. The association of which Recovery Segments are managed by a given BRM is determined at deployment time by the customer, with the help of deployment time templates. BRMs are primarily responsible for operations that relate to error handling and recovery workflow generation, and cross RS interaction.
  • 2. One or more Recovery Segments (RS) (414).
    • Recovery Segments are customer-defined groupings of IT resources to which consistent availability policy is assigned. In other words, a Recovery Segment acts as a context within which resource recovery is performed. In many cases, Recovery Segments are compositions of IT resources that constitute logical entities, such as a middleware and its related physical resources, or an “application” and its related components.
    • There is no presumed granularity of a Recovery Segment. Customers can choose to specify fine-grained Recovery Segments, such as one for a given operating system, or a coarser grained Recovery Segment associated with a business process and its component parts, or even a site, as examples.
    • Relationships between IT resources associated with a RS are those which are part of the IT topology.
    • Recovery Segments can be nested or overlapped. In case of overlapping Recovery Segments, there can be policy associated with each RS, and during policy validation, conflicting definitions are reconciled. Runtime assessment is also used for policy tradeoff.
    • The Recovery Segment has operations which support policy expression, validation, decomposition, and assessment of state.
    • The number of Recovery Segments supported by a BR System can vary, depending on customer configurations and business needs.
    • One BRM can manage multiple Recovery Segments, but a given RS is managed by a single BRM. Further, Recovery Segments that share resources, or are subset/superset of other Recovery Segments are managed by the same BRM, in this example. Multiple BRMs can exist in the environment, depending on performance, availability, and/or maintainability characteristics.
  • 3. Pattern System Environments (PSEs) (416).
    • Pattern System Environments (PSEs) are representations of a customer's environment. Sets of observations are clustered together using available mathematical tooling to generate the PSEs. In one embodiment, the generation of a PSE is automatic. A PSE is associated with a given RS, but a PSE may include information that crosses RSs.
    • As one example, the representation is programmatic in that it is contained within a structure from which information can be added/extracted.
  • 4. Quantified Recovery Goal (418).
    • A quantified recovery goal, such as a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), is specified for each Recovery Segment that a customer creates. If customers have multiple Pattern System Environments (PSEs), a unique RTO for each PSE associated with the RS may be specified.
  • 5. Containment Region (CR) (420).
    • Containment Region(s) are components of the BR System which are used at runtime to reflect the scope and impact of an outage. A Containment Region includes, for instance, identification for a set of impacted resources, as well as BR specific information about the failure/degraded state, as well as proposed recovery. CRs are associated with a set of impacted resources, and are dynamically constructed by BR in assessing the error.
    • The original resources reporting degraded availability, as well as the resources related to those reporting degraded availability, are identified as part of the Containment Region. Impacted resources are accumulated into the topology by traversing the IT relationships and inspecting the attributes defined to the relationships. The Containment Region is transitioned to an inactive state after a successful recovery workflow has completed, and after all information (or a selected subset in another example) about the CR has been logged.
  • 6. Redundancy Groups (RG) (422).
    • Redundancy Group(s) (422) are components of the BR System that represent sets of logically equivalent services that can be used as alternates when a resource experiences failure or degradation. For example, three instances of a database may form a redundancy group, if an application server requires connectivity to one of the set of three, but does not specify one specific instance.
    • There can be zero or more Redundancy Groups in a BR System.
    • Redundancy Groups also have an associated state that is maintained in realtime, and can contribute to the definition of what constitutes available, degraded, or unavailable states. In addition, Redundancy Groups members are dynamically and automatically selected by the BR System, based on availability of the member and co-location constraints.
  • 7. BR Manager Data Table (BRMD) (424).
    • BR maintains specific internal information related to various resources it manages and each entry in the BR specific Management Data (BRMD) table represents such a record of management. Entries in the BRMD represent IT resources.
  • 8. BR Manager Relationship Data Table (BRRD) (426).
    • BR maintains BR specific internal information related to the pairings of resources it needs to interact with, and each entry in the BR specific Relationship Data (BRRD) table represents an instance of such a pairing. The pairing record identifies the resources that participate in the pairing, and resources can be any of those that appear in the BRMD above. The BRRD includes information about the pairings, which include operation ordering across resources, failure and degradation impact across resources, constraint specifications for allowable recovery actions, effect an operation has on resource state, requirements for resource to co-locate or anti-co-locate, and effects of preparatory actions on resources.
  • 9. BR Asynchronous Distributor (BRAD) (428).
    • The BR Asynchronous Distributor (BRAD) is used to handle asynchronous behavior during time critical queries for resource state and key properties, recovery, and for getting observations back from resources for the observation log.
  • 10. Observation Log (430).
    • The Observation Log captures the information that is returned through periodic observations of the environment. The information in the Observation Log is used by cluster tooling to generate Pattern System Environments (PSE).
  • 11. RS Activity Log (432).
    • Each RS has an activity log that represents the RS actions, successes, failures. Activity logs are internal BR structures. Primarily, they are used for either problem determination purposes or at runtime, recovery of failed BR components. For example, when the RS fails and recovers, it reads the Activity Log to understand what was in progress at time of failure, and what needs to be handled in terms of residuals.
  • 12. BRM Activity Log (434).
    • The BRM also has an activity log that represents BRM actions, success, failures. Activity logs are internal BR structures.
  • 13. Transaction Table (TT) (436).
    • The transaction table is a serialization mechanism used to house the counts of ongoing recovery and preparatory operations. It is associated with the RS, and is referred to as the RS TT.

In addition to the Business Resilience Runtime Component of the BR system, the BR system includes the following components, previously mentioned above.

• • User Interface (UI) Component (404).
    • The User interface component is, for instance, a graphical environment through which the customer's IT staff can make changes to the BR configuration. As examples: create and manage Recovery Segments; specify recovery goals; validate achievability of goals prior to failure time; view and alter BR generated workflows.
    • The user interface (UI) is used as the primary interface for configuring BR. It targets roles normally associated with a Business Analyst, Solution Architect, System Architect, or Enterprise Architect, as examples.
    • One purpose of the BR UI is to configure the BR resources. It allows the user to create BR artifacts that are used for a working BR runtime and also monitors the behaviors and notifications of these BR resources as they run. In addition, the BR UI allows interaction with resources in the environment through, for instance, relationships and their surfaced properties and operations. The user can add resources to BR to affect recovery and behaviors of the runtime environment.
    • The BR UI also surfaces recommendations and best practices in the form of templates. These are reusable constructs that present a best practice to the user which can then be approved and realized by the user.
    • Interaction with the BR UI is based on the typical editor save lifecycle used within, for instance, the developmental tool known as Eclipse (available and described at www.Eclipse.org). The user typically opens or edits an existing resource, makes modifications, and those modifications are not persisted back to the resource until the user saves the editor.
    • Predefined window layouts in Eclipse are called perspectives. Eclipse views and editors are displayed in accordance with the perspective's layout, which can be customized by the user. The BR UI provides a layout as exemplified in the screen display depicted in FIG. 5A.
    • Screen display 500 depicted in FIG. 5A displays one example of a Business Resilience Perspective. Starting in the upper left corner and rotating clockwise, the user interface includes, for instance:
      • 1. Business Resilience View 502
      • This is where the user launches topologies and definition templates for viewing and editing.
      • 2. Topology/Definition Template Editor 504
      • This is where the editors are launched from the Business Resilience View display. The user can have any number of editors open at one time.
      • 3. Properties View/Topology Resources View/Search View 506
      • The property and topology resource views are driven off the active editor. They display information on the currently selected resource and allow the user to modify settings within the editor.
      • 4. Outline View 508
      • This view provides a small thumbnail of the topology or template being displayed in the editor. The user can pan around the editor quickly by moving the thumbnail.
    • The topology is reflected by a RS, as shown in the screen display of FIG. 5B. In FIG. 5B, a Recovery Segment 550 is depicted, along with a list of one or more topology resources 552 of the RS (not necessarily shown in the current view of the RS).
    • In one example, the BR UI is created on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), meaning it has complete control over the Eclipse environment, window layouts, and overall behavior. This allows BR to tailor the Eclipse platform and remove Eclipse artifacts not directly relevant to the BR UI application, allowing the user to remain focused, while improving usability.
    • BR extends the basic user interface of Eclipse by creating software packages called “plugins' that plug into the core Eclipse platform architecture to extend its capabilities. By implementing the UI as a set of standard Eclipse plug-ins, BR has the flexibility to plug into Eclipse, WebSphere Integration Developer, or Rational product installs, as examples. The UI includes two categories of plug-ins, those that are BR specific and those that are specific to processing resources in the IT environment. This separation allows the resource plug-ins to be potentially re-used by other products.
    • By building upon Eclipse, BR has the option to leverage other tooling being developed for Eclipse. This is most apparent in its usage of BPEL workflow tooling, but the following packages and capabilities are also being leveraged, in one embodiment, as well:
      • The Eclipse platform provides two graphical toolkit packages, GEF and Draw2D, which are used by BR, in one example, to render topology displays and handle the rather advanced topology layouts and animations. These packages are built into the base Eclipse platform and provide the foundation for much of the tooling and topology user interfaces provided by this design.
      • The Eclipse platform allows building of advanced editors and forms, which are being leveraged for BR policy and template editing. Much of the common support needed for editors, from the common save lifecycle to undo and redo support, is provided by Eclipse.
      • The Eclipse platform provides a sophisticated Welcome and Help system, which helps introduce and helps users to get started configuring their environment. Likewise, Eclipse provides a pluggable capability to create task instructions, which can be followed step-by-step by the user to accomplish common or difficult tasks.
  • BR Admin Mailbox (406) (FIG. 4).
    • The BR Admin (or Administrative) Mailbox is a mechanism used by various flows of the BR runtime to get requests to an administrator to take some action. The Admin mailbox periodically retrieves information from a table, where BR keeps an up-to-date state.
    • As an example, the Admin Mailbox defines a mechanism where BR can notify the user of important events needing user attention or at least user awareness. The notifications are stored in the BR database so they can be recorded while the UI is not running and then shown to the user during their next session.
    • The notifications are presented to the user, in one example, in their own Eclipse view, which is sorted by date timestamp to bubble the most recent notifications to the top. An example of this view is shown in FIG. 6A. As shown, a view 600 is presented that includes messages 602 relating to resources 604. A date timestamp 606 is also included therewith.
    • Double clicking a notification opens an editor on the corresponding resource within the BR UI, which surfaces the available properties and operations the user may need to handle the notification.
    • The user is able to configure the UI to notify them whenever a notification exceeding a certain severity is encountered. The UI then alerts 650 the user of the notification and message when it comes in, as shown in FIG. 6B, in one example.
    • When alerted, the user can choose to open the corresponding resource directly. If the user selects No, the user can revisit the message or resource by using the above notification log view.
  • BR Install Logic (408) (FIG. 4).
    • The BR Install logic initializes the environment through accessing the set of preconfigured template information and vendor provided tables containing resource and relationship information, then applying any customizations initiated by the user.
  • Availability Configuration Templates (410):
    • Recovery Segment Templates
      • The BR System has a set of Recovery Segment templates which represent common patterns of resources and relationships. These are patterns matched with each individual customer environment to produce recommendations for RS definitions to the customer, and offer these visually for customization or acceptance.
    • Redundancy Group Templates
      • The BR System has a set of Redundancy Group templates which represent common patterns of forming groups of redundant resources. These are optionally selected and pattern matched with each individual customer environment to produce recommendations for RG definitions to a customer.
    • BR Manager Deployment Templates
      • The BR System has a set of BR Manager Deployment templates which represent recommended configurations for deploying the BR Manager, its related Recovery Segments, and the related BR management components. There are choices for distribution or consolidation of these components. Best practice information is combined with optimal availability and performance characteristics to recommend a configuration, which can then be subsequently accepted or altered by the customer.
    • Pairing Templates
      • The BR System has a set of Pairing Templates used to represent best practice information about which resources are related to each other.

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 FIG. 7, a Recovery Segment RS 700 is depicted. It is assumed for this Recovery Segment that:

• • The Recovery Segment RS has been defined associated with an instantiated and deployed BR Manager for monitoring and management.
  • Relationships have been established between the Recovery Segment RS and the constituent resources 701a-701m.
  • A goal policy has been defined and validated for the Recovery Segment through interactions with the BR UI.
  • The following impact pairings have been assigned to the resources and relationships:

Rule	Resource #1	State	Resource #2	State
1	App-A	Degraded	RS	Degraded
2	App-A	Unavailable	RS	Unavailable
3	DB2	Degraded	CICS	Unavailable
4	CICS	Unavailable	App-A	Unavailable
5	CICS	Degraded	App-A	Degraded
6	OSStorage-1	Unavailable	CICS	Degraded
7	OSStorage-1	Unavailable	Storage Copy Set	Degraded
8	DB2 User &	Degraded	DB2	Degraded
	Log Data
9	OSStorage-2	Unavailable	DB2 User &	Degraded
			Log Data
10	z/OS	Unavailable	CICS	Unavailable
11	z/OS	Unavailable	DB2	Unavailable
12	Storage Copy Set	Degraded	CICS User &	Degraded
			Log Data
13	Storage Copy Set	Degraded	DB2 User &	Degraded
			Log Data

• • The rules in the above table correspond to the numbers in the figure. For instance, #12 (704) corresponds to Rule 12 above.
  • Observation mode for the resources in the Recovery Segment has been initiated either by the customer or as a result of policy validation.
  • The environment has been prepared as a result of that goal policy via policy validation and the possible creation and execution of a preparatory workflow.
  • The goal policy has been activated for monitoring by BR.

As a result of these conditions leading up to runtime, the following subscriptions have already taken place:

• • The BRM has subscribed to runtime state change events for the RS.
  • RS has subscribed to state change events for the constituent resources.

These steps highlight one example of an error detection process:

• • The OS Storage-1 resource 702h fails (goes Unavailable).
  • RS gets notified of state change event.
  • 1^st level state aggregation determines:
    • Storage Copy Set→Degraded
    • CICS User & Log Data→Degraded
    • DB2 User & Log Data→Degraded
    • DB2→Degraded
    • CICS→Unavailable
    • App-A→Unavailable
  • 1^st level state aggregation determines:
    • RS→Unavailable
  • BRM gets notified of RS state change. Creates the following Containment Region:

Resource             Reason

OSStorage-1          Unavailable
Storage Copy Set     Degraded
CICS User & Log Data Degraded
DB2 User & Log Data  Degraded
DB2                  Degraded
App-A                Unavailable
CICS                 Unavailable
RS                   Unavailable

• • Creates a recovery workflow based on the following resources:

Resource             State

OSStorage-1          Unavailable
Storage Copy Set     Degraded
CICS User & Log Data Degraded
DB2 User & Log Data  Degraded
DB2                  Degraded
App-A                Unavailable
CICS                 Unavailable
RS                   Unavailable

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:

Goal Policy Support

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.

Metrics and Goal Association

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).

Relationships Used by BR, and BR Specific Resource Pairing Information

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.

Evaluation of Failure Scope

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.

Generation and Use of Workflow

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:

• • Preparatory—Steps taken during the policy prepare phase in support of a given goal, such as the setting of specific configuration values, or the propagation of availability related policy on finer grained resources in the Recovery Segment composition. BR generates preparatory workflows, for instance, dynamically. Examples of preparatory actions include setting up storage replication, and starting additional instances of middleware subsystems to support redundancy.
  • Recovery—Steps taken as a result of fault detection during runtime monitoring of the environment, such as, for example, restarting a failed operating system (OS). BR generates recovery workflows dynamically, in one example, based on the actual failure rather than a prespecified sequence.
  • Preventive—Steps taken to contain or fence an error condition and prevent the situation from escalating to a more substantial outage or impact; for example, the severing of a failed resource's relationship instances to other resources. Preventive workflows are also dynamically generated, in one example.
  • Return—Steps taken to restore the environment back to ‘normal operations’ post recovery, also represented as dynamically generated workflows, as one example.
    Capturing of Workflow Information

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:

• • Bolie, et al., BPEL Cookbook: Best Practices for SOA-based Integration and Composite Applications Development, ISBN 1904811337, 2006, PACKT Publishing, hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety;
  • Juric, et al., Business Process Execution Language for Web Services: BPEL and BPEL YWS, ISBN 1-904811-18-3, 2004, PACKT Publishing, hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • http://www-306.ibm.com/software/integration/wid/about/?S_CMP=rnav
  • http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/
  • http://www.parasoft.com/jsp/products/home.jsp;jessionid=aaa56iqFywA-HJ?product=BPEL&redname=googbpelm&referred=searchengine%2Fgoogle%Fbpel
    Tooling Lifecycle, Support of Managed Resources and Roles

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:

• • Visual presentation of the IT resources & their relationships, within both an operations and administration context.
  • Configuration and deployment of Recovery Segments and BRMs.
  • Authoring and deployment of a BR policy.
  • Modification of availability configuration or policy changes for BR.
  • BPEL tooling to support viewing of BR created, as well as customer authored, workflows.
  • BPEL tooling to support monitoring of workflow status, related to an operations console view of IT resource operational state.
    Policy Lifecycle

The policy lifecycle for BR goal policies, such as RTO goals, includes, for example:

• • Define—Policy is specified to a RS, but no action is taken by the BRM to support the policy (observation information may be obtained).
  • Validate—Policy is validated for syntax, capability, etc.; preparatory workflow created for viewing and validation by customer.
  • Prepare—Preparatory action workflows are optionally executed.
  • Activate—Policy is activated for runtime monitoring of the environment.
  • Modify—Policy is changed dynamically in runtime.
    Configurable State Aggregation

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.

Failure During Workflow Sequences of Preparatory, Recovery, Preventive

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.

Customer Values

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:

• • Align total IT runtime environment to business function availability objectives:
    • RS definition from representation of IT Resources;
    • Goal (RTO) and action policy specification, validation and activation; and
    • Tooling by Eclipse, as an example, to integrate with IT process management.
  • Rapid, flexible, administrative level:
    • Alteration of operation escalation rules;
    • Customization of workflows for preparatory and recovery to customer goals;
    • Customization of IT resource selection from RG based on quality of service (QoS);
    • Alteration of definition of IT resource and business application state (available, degraded, or unavailable);
    • Customization of aggregated state;
    • Modification of topology for RS and RG definition;
    • Selection of BR deployment configuration;
    • Alteration of IT resource recovery metrics;
    • Customization of generated Pattern System Environments; and
    • Specification of statistical tolerances required for system environment formation or recovery metric usage.
  • Extensible framework for customer and vendor resources:
    • IT resource definitions not specific to BR System; and
    • Industry standard specification of workflows, using, for instance, BPEL standards.
  • Adaptive to configuration changes and optimization:
    • IT resource lifecycle and relationships dynamically maintained;
    • System event infrastructure utilized for linkage of IT resource and BR management;
    • IT resource recovery metrics identified and collected;
    • IT resource recovery metrics used in forming Pattern System Environments;
    • Learned recovery process effectiveness applied to successive recovery events;
    • System provided measurement of eventing infrastructure timing;
    • Dynamic formation of time intervals for aggregation of related availability events to a root cause; and
    • Distribution of achieved recovery time over constituent resources.
  • Incremental adoption and coexistence with other availability offerings:
    • Potential conflict of multiple managers for a resource based on IT representation;
    • Workflows for recovery and preparatory reflect operations with meta data linked to existing operations;
    • Advisory mode execution for preparatory and recovery workflows; and
    • Incremental inclusion of resources of multiple types.
  • Support for resource sharing:
    • Overlapping and contained RS;
    • Merger of CR across RS and escalation of failure scope; and
    • Preparatory and recovery workflows built to stringency requirements over multiple RS.
  • Extensible formalization of best practices based on industry standards:
    • Templates and patterns for RS and RG definition;
    • Preparatory and recovery workflows (e.g., BPEL) for customization, adoption; and
    • Industry standard workflow specifications enabling integration across customer and multiple vendors.
  • Integration of business resilience with normal runtime operations and IT process automation:
    • Option to base on IT system wide, open industry standard representation of resources;
    • BR infrastructure used for localized recovery within a system, cluster and across sites; and
    • Utilization of common system infrastructure for events, resource discovery, workflow processing, visualization.

Management of the IT environment is adaptively performed, as described herein and in a U.S. patent application “Adaptive Business Resiliency Computer System for Information Technology Environments,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/966,195, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,855, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,906, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,877, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,832, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,851, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,874, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/966,619, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,978, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,894, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,951, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,930, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,838, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,902, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,917, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,862, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,913, 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,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,897, 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:

• • Coordination for administrative task that employ multiple steps, as described in “Adaptive Computer Sequencing of Actions,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,899, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • Use of provided templates representing best practices in defining the BR system, as described in “Defining and Using Templates in Configuring Information Technology Environments,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,845, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • Use of provided templates in formulation of workflows, as described in “Using Templates in a Computing Environment,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,922, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • Making changes to the availability goals while supporting ongoing BR operation, as described herein, in accordance with one or more aspects of the present invention.
  • Making changes to the scope of a business application or Recovery Segment, as described in “Non-Disruptively Changing Scope of Computer Business Applications Based on Detected Changes in Topology,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,889, Bobak et al. which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • Detecting and recovery for the BR system is performed non-disruptively, as described in “Managing Processing of a Computing Environment During Failures of the Environment,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,872, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety.

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.

Resource Type	Property	Value Range
Operating System	Identifier	Text
	State	Ok, stopping, planned stop,
		stopped, starting, error, lost
		monitoring capability, unknown
	Memory Size	Units in MB
	Number of systems in sysplex, if	integer
	applicable
	Last IPL time of day	Units in time of day/clock
	Type of last IPL	Cold, warm, emergency
	Total Real Storage Available	Units in MB
	GRS Star Mode	Yes or No
	Complete IPL time to reach	Units of elapsed time
	‘available’
	Total CPU using to reach	Units of elapsed time
	available during IPL
	Total CPU delay to reach	Units of elapsed time
	available during IPL
	Total Memory using to reach	Units in MB
	available during IPL
	Total Memory delay to reach	Units of elapsed time
	available during IPL
	Total i/o requests	Integer value, number of requests
	Total i/o using to reach available	Units of elapsed time
	during IPL
	Total i/o delay to reach available	Units of elapsed time
	during IPL
Computer System (LPAR,	Identifier	Text
Server, etc.)
	State	Ok, stopping, stopped, planned
		down, starting, error, lost
		monitoring capability, unknown
	Type of CPU - model, type,	Text value
	serial
	Number of CPUs	integer
	Number of shared processors	integer
	Number of dedicated processors	integer
	Last Activate Time of Day	Units in time of day/clock
Network Components
Group of Network Connections	Identity
	Operational State	Ok, Starting, Disconnected,
		Stopping, Degraded, Unknown
	State of each associated Network	Text
	Application Connection
	Performance Stats on loss and	Complex
	delays
	Recovery Time for any	Units in elapsed time
	associated application network
	connections
	Number of active application	Integer
	network connections associated
	at time of network problem
	Stopped Time/duration for	Units in elapsed time
	group of connectoins
	Maximum Network Recovery	Units in elapsed time
	Time for any application
	connection in group
	Maximum Number of active	Integer
	connections at time of network
	problem encountered, for any
	application connection in group
	Maximum Number of	Integer
	connections processed at time of
	network recovery, for the group
	of connections
	Maximum network connection	Units in elapsed time
	recovery time/duration for any
	application connection in the
	group
	Maximum Number of	Integer
	connections dropped at time of
	application network connection
	recovery, for any application
	connection in the group
Network Application Connection	Identity	Text
	State	Ok, Stopping, Degraded, Error,
		Unknown
	Configuration Settings	Complex
	Associated TCP/IP Parameter	Text
	Settings
	Requirement Policies	QoS or BR policies
	Performance Statistics, rules,	Complex
	service class, number of active
	Network OS services
	State update Interval	Units of elapsed time
	Last restart time of day	Units in time of day/clock
	Last Restart Time/Duration	Units in elapsed time
	Network Recovery Time for app	Units in elapsed time
	connection
	Number of active connections at	Integer
	time of network problem
	encountered, on a per app
	connection basis
	Number of connections	Integer
	processed at time of network
	recovery, for the app connection
	application network connection	Units in elapsed time
	recovery time/duration
	Number of connections at time of	Integer
	application network connection
	problem encountered
	Number of connections	Integer
	processed at time of application
	network connection recovery
	Number of connections dropped	Integer
	at time of application network
	connection recovery
Network Host Connection	Identity	Text
	State	Ok, Stopping, Degraded, Error,
		Unknown
	Configuration Settings	Complex
	Associated TCP/IP Parameter	Text
	Settings
	Requirement Policies	QoS or BR policies
	Performance Statistics, rules,	Complex
	service class, number of active
	Network OS services
	State update Interval	Units of elapsed time
	Last restart time of day	Units in time of day/clock
	Last Restart Time/Duration	Units in elapsed time
	Number of QoS Events,	Integer
	indicating potential degradation
	Number of QoS Events handled,	Integer
	Last handled QoS Event	Text
Database Subsystem	Name, identifier	Text
	Operational State	Operational, Nonoperational,
		starting, stopping, in recovery,
		log suspended, backup initiated,
		restore initiated, restore
		complete, in checkpoint,
		checkpoint completed, applying
		log, backing out inflights,
		resolving indoubts, planned
		termination, lost monitoring
		capability
	Time spent in log apply	Units of elapsed time
	Time spent during inflight	Units of elapsed time
	processing
	Time spent during indoubt	Units of elapsed time
	processing
	Total time to restart	Units of elapsed time
	Checkpoint frequency	Units of time
	Backout Duration	Number of records to read back
		in log during restart processing
	CPU Used during Restart	Units of elapsed time
	CPU Delay during Restart	Units of elapsed time
	Memory Used during Restart	Units in MB
	Memory Delay during Restart	Units of elapsed time
	I/O Requests during restart	Integer value of number of
		requests
	I/O using during restart	Units of elapsed time
	I/O Delay during restart	Units of elapsed time
Database Datasharing Group	Identifer	Text
	Operational State	Operational, nonoperational,
		degraded (some subset of
		members non operational), lost
		monitoring capability
	Number of locks in Shared	Integer value
	Facility
	Time spent in lock cleanup for	Elapsed time value
	last restart
Database	Identifier	Text
Tablespace	Identifier	Text
Transaction Region	Identifier	Text
	Name	Text
	Associated job name	Text
	Maximum number of tasks/	Integer value
	threads
	Restart type for next restart	Warm, cold, emergency
	Forward log name	Text
	System log name	Text
	Operational State	Operational, nonoperational, in
		recovery, starting, stop normal
		first quiesce, stop normal second
		quiesce, stop normal third
		quiesce
	Time spent in log apply	Units of elapsed time
	Time during each recovery stage	Units of elapsed time
	Total time to restart	Units of elapsed time
	CPU Used during Restart	Units of elapsed time
	CPU Delay during Restart	Units of elapsed time
	Memory Used during Restart	Units in MB
	Memory Delay during Restart	Units of elapsed time
	I/O Requests during restart	Integer value of number of
		requests
	I/O connect time during restart	Units of elapsed time
	I/O Delay during restart	Units of elapsed time
	System Logsize	Units in MB
	Forward Logsize	Units in MB
	Activity Keypoint frequency	Integer - number of writes before
		activity checkpoint taken
	Average Transaction Rate for	Number of transactions per
	this region	second, on average
Transaction Group	Group name	Text
Transaction Region File	Filename	Text
	Region Name	Text
	Dataset Name	Text
	Operational State	Operational/enabled,
		nonoperational/disabled
	Open status	Open, closed, closing
Transaction	Identifier	Text
	Operational State	Running, failed, shunted, retry in
		progress
	Region Name (s) that can run this	Text
	transaction
	Program Name	Text
Logical Replication Group of	Identity	Text
related datasets
	State
	Required currency characteristics	Complex
	for datasets
	Required consistency	Complex
	characteristics for datasets
Replication Group	Identity
	State
Replication Session	Identity
	State	Established, in progress
		replication, replication successful
		complete
	Type of Session	Flash copy, metro mirror, etc.
	Duration of last replication	Units in elapsed time
	Time of Day for last replication	Units in time of day/clock
	Amount of data replicated at last	Units in MB
	replication
Roleset	Identity	Text
	State
CopySet	Identity	Text
	State
Dataset	Identity	Text
	State	Open, Closed
Storage Group	Identity	Text
	State
Storage Volume	Identity	Text
	State	Online, offline, boxed, unknown
Logical Storage Subsystem	Identity	Text
	State
Storage Subsystem	Identity	Text
	State
	Subsystem I/O Velocity - ratio of
	time channels are being used
Replication Link (Logical)	Identity	Text
between Logical Subsystems
	State	Operational, nonoperational,
		degraded redundancy
	Number of configured pipes	Integer
	Number of operational pipes	Integer

A specific example of key RTO properties for a z/OS® image is depicted in FIG. 8A. As shown, for a z/OS® image 800, the following properties are identified: GRS mode 802, CLPA? (i.e., Was the link pack area page space initialized?) 804, I/O bytes moved 806, real memory size 808, # CPs 810, CPU speed 812, and CPU delay 814, as examples.

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 FIG. 8B, in which a Recovery Segment 820 is shown that includes a plurality of resources 822a-m, each having its own set of metrics 824a-m, as indicated by the shading.

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:

UseHistoricalObservations The resource has a collection of statistically
                          meaningful observations of recovery time,
                          where definition of ‘statistically valid’ is
                          provided on a resource basis, as default by
                          BR, but tailorable by customers
UseCustomerInputTimings   The customer can explicitly set the
                          operation timings for a resource

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:

Metric                           Qualification

Last observed recovery/restart time In milliseconds;
                                 or alternately specifying units to use in calculations
The key factors and associated   Captured at last observed recovery time, and capturable
values of the resource that affect at a point in time by BR
recovery time
The key factors and associated   Captured at last observed recovery time, and capturable
values of the resource that affect at a point in time by BR
other dependent resources’ recovery
times
Observed time interval from ‘start’ If there are various points in the resource recovery
state to each ‘non-blocking’ state lifecycle at which it becomes non-blocking to other
                                 resources which depend upon it, then:
                                 Observed time interval from ‘start’ state to each
                                 ‘non-blocking’ state
Resource Consumption Information If the resource can provide information about its
                                 consumption, or the consumption of dependent
                                 resources, on an interval basis, then BR will use this
                                 information in forming PSEs and classifying timings.
                                 One example of this is: cpu, i/o, memory usage
                                 information that is available from zOS WLM for an
                                 aggregation of processes/address spaces over a given
                                 interval.

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:

• • The operational state of the resource at which the observed recovery time interval started.
  • The operational state of the resource at which the observed recovery time interval ended.
  • The operational states of the resource at which point it can unblock dependent resources (example: operational states at which a DB2 could unblock new work from CICS, at which it could allow processing of logs for transactions ongoing at time of failure . . . ).
  • Values of statistical thresholds to indicate sufficient observations for goal managing the resource (number of observations, max standard deviations, confidence level).

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:

• • Are present to collect observation data for PSE formation.
  • Are present to understand impacts on managed resources.
  • No decomposed RTO is associated with an assessed resource.
  • They are resources on which resources managed by BR depend upon, but are not directly acted on for availability by BR.
  • They are resources removed (or not explicitly added) from the actively monitored set of resources by the BR admin during RS definition.
  • They are resources that BR does not try to recover and BR thus will not invoke any preparatory or recovery operations on them.

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:

• • They have an entry in the BRMD, depending on their use, and the BRMD entry has an indication of assessed vs. managed.
  • The RS subscribes to state change notifications for assessed resources (and possibly other notifiable properties).
  • Relationships between observed and managed resources are possible (and likely).
  • BR monitors for lifecycle events on assessed resources in the same manner as for managed resources.
  • Assessed resources can be added and/or removed from Recovery Segments.
  • They can be used to contribute to the aggregated state of an RS.

Finally, there are a few restrictions that BR imposes upon assessed resources, in this embodiment:

• • Again, BR does not invoke any workflow operations on assessed resources.
  • A resource that is shared between two Recovery Segments is not categorized as an assessed resource in one RS and a managed resource in the other. It is one or the other in the RS's, but not both.

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:

• • To perform statistical analysis from the BR UI to form characterizations of customers' normal execution environments, represented in BR as Pattern System Environments (PSE).
  • To classify operations on resources into these PSEs for purposes of determining operation execution duration.
  • Help determine approximate path length of operations that are pushed down from BR to the resources, and possibly to the underlying instrumentation of each resource.
  • Help determine approximate path length of activities executed within BPEL workflows.
  • Finally, the data collected via the observation is also used to update the metadata associated with the resource (i.e., in the BRMD table) where appropriate.

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:

• • 1. The BR UI allows the administrator to enable observation mode at a Recovery Segment, which will change its “ObservationMode” resource property to “True”, and to set the polling interval (default=15 minutes). The Recovery Segment is defined in order to allow observation mode, but a policy does not have to be defined or activated for it.
  • 2. Once a policy is defined though and subsequently activated, observation mode is set for the Recovery Segment (due to the data being used in managing and monitoring the customer's environment). Thus, it is set automatically at policy activation, if not already set explicitly by the administrator (see 1 above) using the default polling interval (15 minutes).

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:

• • 1. Periodic poll.
  • 2. Workflow (includes workflow begin/end, and workflow activity begin/end).

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:

• • 1. Resource has RTO properties.
  • 2. Resource has operations.
  • 3. Resource participates in the aggregated state for the Recovery Segment, in which it is contained.
  • 4. Resource participates in any of the six types of pairing rules.

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 to detect changes in management policy (a.k.a., goal) of an IT environment, and to non-disruptively change the environment, based on the detected changes.

Customer environments, business application criticality, and service level agreements for availability or other management goal change over time. Existing facilities for availability management require customers to explicitly change individual product configuration information to adapt to changes. Individual product controls are not directly related to business application service level agreements or criticality. Product level controls are not consistent in defining what is altered and there is practically no means for determining the effect changing product controls will have on other products or on the customers' business application. Significant problems caused by existing facilities include:

• • 1. High cost and scarce skill for adapting products to meet customer availability goals.
  • 2. Fragile implementations of sequences of individual product commands which if changed have high risk on customer business application availability.
  • 3. Long lead times for introducing changes to the customer environment.
  • 4. Unpredictable and unintended effects of alterations to the environment created for supporting availability of customer business applications.
  • 5. No means for associating changes to the environment in advance of an outage which would make attainment of availability objective achievable when an outage occurs.
  • 6. No predictive means for assessing achievability of availability objective.
    Overview

In one implementation, BR accepts specification of a goal from the customer, such as an availability goal specified as a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) policy associated with a collection of resources being used to support a business application identified as a Recovery Segment. In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, this goal, however, can be programmatically changed, while continuing to perform IT management functions.

As one example, changes to goal specification and associated validation of the changed policy are addressed herein. In the example described herein, the goal is RTO; however, in other examples, the goal can be other than RTO. Specifically, BR (or other disciplines—BR is only one example) provides the ability to, for instance:

• • 1. Alter the RTO (or other goal) associated with a business application (represented to BR as a Recovery Segment) while continuing to enforce the existing RTO (or other goal).
  • 2. Evaluate the achievability of the goal specification for the environments specified by the customer.
  • 3. Generate a delta workflow reflecting changes to the environment which enable achievement of the new goal (e.g., RTO). Determine if the delta workflow can be executed non-disruptively.
  • 4. Execute the generated workflow reflecting a delta to the existing configuration for enabling achievement of the new goal.
  • 5. Monitor the generated workflow for successful or unsuccessful completion.
  • 6. Create, execute and monitor a workflow to undo changes introduced by the delta workflow, if it is unsuccessful.

BR policy can be dynamically changed during runtime operations for a RS, with certain restrictions. The currently active environment is not to degrade automatically without an explicit deactivation from the BR Administrator. Changes that can occur without disruption of the current environment are allowed to proceed as part of policy change.

For a policy change, the customer defines and validates the policy to “switch to”, and an initiation of change causes BR to produce a “delta” workflow which is the difference between what is currently prepared and what is required to support the change in goal. Specific restrictions are enforced for changing the policy for a RS that shares resources with other RS(s), or is a subset/superset of another RS. If the policy change will cause disruption, then, in one embodiment, the Administrator is to explicitly deactivate the RS for monitoring, change the policy, re-prepare, and reactivate. These explicit actions will be a planned activity for the Administrator, which is employed, in one example, for a disruptive change.

In one implementation, changing the BR RTO goal policy is a megaflow or complex task that includes a plurality of individual tasks or actions. One example of the logic to manage megaflows is described in U.S. patent application “Adaptive Computer Sequencing of Actions,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,899, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Alternatively, the customer may execute the individual tasks through invocation of the BR UI, or the individual tasks can be pieced together using nested transaction scopes if the selected runtime environment supports that concept. Examples of the individual tasks to be performed to change a goal are described below. In one example, each task is run in a transaction, but no overall transaction scope exists. In another example, the one or more of the tasks are not run as transactions.

• • Task 1: Define policy if not defined.
  • Task 2: Validate policy if not validated.
  • Task 3: Generate prepare workflow for new policy.
  • Task 4: Optionally modify prepare workflow for new policy.
  • Task 5: Generate delta prepare workflow and determine compatibility of preparatory operations.
  • Task 6: If the customer wants to change the goal, submit the delta workflow, monitor the delta workflow and undo on failure.
  • Task 7: Activate if customer wants to activate the new policy.

These tasks are described in further detail below.

Megaflow Tasks Details

Alter the RTO Associated with a Business Application (Represented to BR as a Recovery Segment) while Continuing to Enforce the Existing RTO.

Through interaction with the BR administrator, a new RTO for a specific customer environment is established. Definition of a revised RTO objective follows the same process as used in initial definition of BR policy, an embodiment of which is described in a U.S. patent application “Programmatic Validation in an Information Technology Environment,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/966,619, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.

In one implementation, a PSE is a representation of a customer environment used to characterize the manner in which the goal of a business application is to be processed. A PSE has associated with it a set of one or more date and time ranges. For example, each Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. except holidays. A PSE is associated with a business application which in one implementation may be represented by a Recovery Segment. Therefore, the PSE is associated with a collection of IT resources. Each of the associated IT resources may have one or more supported operations for one or more discrete functions, such as recovery or preparing the environment for recovery. For each such resource operation, the PSE has an operation execution duration. As operation execution duration may change over time, the monitoring function of the BR system gathers real-time operation execution duration time and updates the PSE. A PSE may be formed by programmatic processes acting on data gathered from the customer environment. In one implementation, observation mode is enabled for a RS resulting in monitoring functions gathering data on the resources associated with the RS, including operation execution duration. This data is recorded to a log from which programmatic processes may evaluate characteristics of the customer environment resulting in a suggested set of PSE(s).

A BR policy is associated with a representation of the customer's environment termed a Pattern System Environment (PSE). Alternatively, operation execution time may be specified through a file or database table containing identification of resource, operation on the resource and execution time for the operation.

In one example, a goal may be defined manually or through use of the processing described herein. Defining a goal includes, for instance, associating a quantitative goal, such as a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), with a business application. In one implementation, a business application is represented programmatically by a Recovery Segment (RS). 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.

Evaluate the Achievability of the RTO Specification for the Environments Specified by the Customer.

Prior to altering the existing IT environment, changes in RTO specification are evaluated against the PSE(s) specified to determine if achievement of the RTO goal is possible. Validation insures operation execution duration timings exist (either from observed history or from customer specification) for resources contained in the RS. A combination of validation (as described in a U.S. patent application “Programmatic Validation in an Information Technology Environment,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/966,619, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and generation of preparatory workflow (as described in a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Generation of Processes in Computing Environments,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,894, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety) creates a preparatory workflow based on the new RTO goal and builds a recovery plan starting with the assumption that all resources in the RS are to be recovered. An assessment of the achievability of the recovery plan is performed by validation based on operation execution timings associated with the specified PSE. The new preparatory workflow is preserved for subsequent analysis and generation of a delta workflow. Further details regarding validation are described below.

When a goal is associated with a business application, it is desirable to predict whether or not that goal is achievable. That is the responsibility of validation. Validation can be performed by human inspection of the resources supporting the business application, followed by an analysis of recovery operations those resources may support and a further analysis of the ordering and execution time of the set of recovery operations.

Alternatively, the validating process is programmatic and performs the following steps, in one example. A goal in the form of a policy is specified by the BR administrator through the BR provided User Interface (UI). Additionally, a representation of the customer environment may be specified, as in one implementation through a RS. A worst case scenario in which recovery for all resources associated with the RS is used to determine if the goal is achievable. Recovery operations for each resource and the execution duration time for each recovery operation could be specified through a file or database table. Alternatively, recovery operations and related execution duration times, in the context of a particular customer environment, may be associated with a PSE. Further, recovery operations which result in a resource becoming available from a failed or degraded state may be represented through pairings. In one example, a recovery operation is selected from potential recovery operations. For instance, the recovery operation having the smallest operation execution duration time is selected.

Having selected recovery operations for resources supporting the business application, any dependencies those operations may have on other operations are identified. This identification could be through specification or dependencies in a file or database table. Alternatively, operation ordering dependencies may be specified through pairings. Operations which are depended on are added to the set of recovery operations. Subsequently, any ordering dependencies among recovery operations in the set is identified and used to sequence operations. Ordering dependencies may be specified through a file or database table. Alternatively, ordering dependencies may be specified through pairings. From the ordered set of operations, a total recovery time may be calculated manually. Alternatively, a programmatic representation of the recovery set of operations may be generated in the form of a Gantt chart from which the maximum time for executing the sequence of recovery operations may be determined.

In order to validate the achievability of a quantitative goal, the preconditioned state of the IT environment is evaluated, in one example. Preconditioning may include specific actions taken on each resource. For example, establishing a flash copy set for storage resource, establishing an active data sharing environment for a database resource, or establishing a level of redundancy in containers supporting application logic. Manual inspection of the IT environment may be performed to make the required evaluation and to identify preparatory actions required to make achievement of the availability goal possible. Alternatively, this evaluation is performed programmatically.

The current state of resources is determined and used in conjunction with preparatory effect pairing constructs to determine if the current state of a resource can meet the recovery goals or if operations to alter the current state of the resource, preparatory operations, are needed to enable achievement of the recovery goal. For example, if a RTO of 30 seconds is to be achieved, and the business application uses a DB2® database, the storage backing the database may or may not have a duplicate copy maintained by synchronous replication. Suppose the storage for the database does not have a duplicate initially. Recovery operations would require restoring a previous copy of the database and application of database log records from the point in time the copy was created until the failure of the storage volume was detected. This process would in all likelihood not meet the 30 second RTO goal. Alternatively, if a duplicate copy of the storage volume is established and maintained through synchronous replication, at the time of failure of the storage volume a recovery operation which switches to the duplicate copy can complete well within the 30 second RTO goal. Therefore, given the recovery times associated with having or not having a duplicate copy of the storage volume, it is determined that creation of a duplicate copy of the storage volume and ongoing synchronous replication is a required preparatory operation to achieve the specified RTO goal. Many such examples exist depending on the resource and the different recovery operations which may be performed predicated on the state of the resource at the time of failure and the ability to precondition the resource to achieve a RTO.

Where preparatory operations are required, precursor operations and dependencies among the set of operations is determined using pairings. The set of preparatory operations may then be formed into a workflow and provided to the customer for programmatic execution or manual execution. After the IT environment has been altered by a set of preconditioning actions, a subsequent validation of achievability for the goal detects the alternations resulting in a potentially different set or a null set of preconditioning actions.

In the cases referenced above where pairing constructs are utilized, those constructs may be conditionally included in BR system processing based on trigger rules and real-time IT environment conditions.

If preconditioning actions (a.k.a., preparatory processing) is employed, some of the preparatory operations may fail to execute correctly. Should a failure of a preparatory operation occur, the IT environment may need to be returned to the prior state. An undo set of operations is formed, in one example, and executed manually through human intervention. An alternative implementation provides a programmatic formation of an undo workflow process to be conditionally executed should a preparatory workflow result in failed operations. Formation of the undo workflow uses pairing constructs to identify undo operations.

When an IT environment has been preconditioned through preparatory actions to assure achievability of a goal, it is monitored to insure prepared resources do not become changed such that the goal would fail to be achievable. Monitoring of the prepared environment may be achieved through manual, human intervention or through monitoring associated with individual products and coordinated by the customer.

For example, preparatory operations which are selected for the new workflow are evaluated to determine if a disruptive change to the current environment will occur. By changing the RTO, the required state of resources in advance of an outage may also change. If changing the RTO causes a resource to have a less stringent state of preparedness, the customer is notified. BR does not automatically lower the stringency state of preparedness of a resource. If a more stringent state of preparedness is required for a resource, operations affecting that state may be capable of being executed without impact to the current environment. Non-disruptive operations are added to the new workflow. Operations which would be disruptive to the current environment are not added to the workflow. BR provides notification to the customer if disruptive operations are required by the change in RTO.

Recognition of stringency of preparedness of a resource resulting from preparatory operation execution is achieved through use of metadata associated with the resource and operations on the resource. An example implementation of reducing stringency is described below. BR metadata on resource operations is also used to determine if execution of an operation is disruptive or non-disruptive to the current IT environment.

Generate a Delta Workflow Reflecting Changes to the Environment which Enable Achievement of the New RTO. Determine if the Delta Workflow can be Executed Non-Disruptively.

After a new preparatory workflow has been constructed based on the new RTO goal, a comparison of the existing environment with the required state of preparedness for the new RTO is assessed. For each operation in the new prepare workflow, BR determines if the operation is non-disruptive. In particular, as one example, the metadata associated with operations on the resource indicate if the operation can be performed without impact to some currently existing state. For example, if a storage volume supports both synchronous and asynchronous copy, changing from asynchronous to synchronous may be achievable non-disruptively or may not. Changing from synchronous to asynchronous may not be achievable non-disruptively or may depending on the capabilities of the storage facility. BR determines if the operation has previously been performed with the same execution options and if the operation results in a more or less stringent state of preparedness for the resource. Operations which are non-disruptive, have not been executed or are to be executed with different options and result in a more stringent state of preparedness for the resource are included in a delta workflow.

After determining what operations are to be included in the delta workflow, BR assesses the required ordering of operations and includes any dependent operations. In one implementation, ordering of operations and including dependent operations is achieved by BR based on pairing information. Pairing information is described in a co-filed application, entitled “Conditional Computer Runtime Control of an Information Technology Environments Based on Pairing Constructs,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,874. Alternatively, ordering of operations may be represented in a file or database table.

In one example, operations in the delta workflow are divided into those that should be executed in advance of activating the policy and those that should be performed when the policy is made active for BR management to the RTO goal. One example implementation to generate a delta workflow is described below.

In a further embodiment, BR builds a list of operations that would be required to undo the effect of operations in the delta workflow based on pairing information. The list of undo operations is ordered and dependent operations are included based on pairing information. The resulting list of undo operations is preserved to be used if the delta workflow does not execute successfully.

Execute the Generated Workflow Reflecting a Delta to the Existing Configuration for Enabling Achievement of the New RTO.

After the delta workflow has been created, it is presented to the customer for consideration. If the customer chooses to have the IT environment prepared to achieve the new RTO goal, the delta workflow is submitted for execution. In one implementation, submission of the delta workflow for execution and monitoring the delta workflow follows similar processes as for an initial preparatory workflow (described in U.S. patent application “Dynamic Generation of Processes in Computing Environments,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,894, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety).

Monitor the Generated Workflow for Successful or Unsuccessful Completion.

As the delta workflow executes, individual preparatory operations are assessed for successful or unsuccessful execution. For example, if an operation completes with a return code of, for instance, 0, it is successful. Further, the state of the resource on which the operation was executed can be assessed to determine if the expected state is achieved based on operation effect pairings. Progress of the workflow as a whole is monitored on a periodic basis by BR. When the delta workflow has ended, an assessment is made to determine if it completed successfully or unsuccessfully. On successful execution, the customer is notified and given the option of making the new RTO goal the current policy. On unsuccessful execution, the undo process is initiated.

In one implementation, the following steps are taken during the monitoring of the delta workflow:

• • Record completion of delta workflow execution.
  • Notify BR Administrator of success or failure.
  • Unsubscribe or unregister for changes of state for resources found in the preparatory workflow, if the preparatory workflow is to be undone.
  • Build undo preparatory workflow, if required.
  • Initiate undo preparatory workflow on preparatory workflow failure and store id of undo workflow returned from BPEL runtime.
  • Initiate monitor of undo preparatory workflow, if required.
  • End serialization of preparatory flows on successful completion; otherwise undo workflow in process.
    Create, Execute and Monitor a Workflow to Undo Changes Introduced by the Delta Workflow if it is Unsuccessful.

On failure to successfully execute the delta workflow, BR uses the undo operation list created when the delta workflow was formed. From the undo operation list, a workflow is created and submitted. The undo workflow is monitored for successful or unsuccessful execution. If the undo workflow is unsuccessful, in one example, a mailbox, notification is sent to the BR Administrator.

Megaflow for Non-Disruptive Goal Policy Change

One embodiment of the logic to provide a non-disruptive goal policy change is described with reference to FIGS. 9A-9B. As one example, this logic is invoked via the BR Administrator interface to change the BR RTO goal policy of a business application (i.e., Recovery Segment) that already has a goal policy being enforced. This logic is a megaflow and, in one example, follows the pattern described in a U.S. patent application “Adaptive Computer Sequencing of Actions,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,899, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. The individual steps are invoked between various interactions with the BR UI, and each step in this particular megaflow is run in a transaction, although no overall transaction scope exists. In another example, one or more of the steps are non-transactional.

In one example, this megaflow is invoked when an explicit change policy action is initiated via the BR UI by the BR Administrator.

This logic assumes that the BR Administrator defines a new policy for the Recovery Segment. An alternate logic is possible where an existing goal policy for the Recovery Segment is chosen, instead of defining a new one.

• • Referring to FIG. 9A, the process for defining a new RTO goal policy is started by the BR Administrator by right-clicking on the pertinent Recovery Segment using the BR Eclipse plugin and selecting the “Change Goal Policy” option, STEP 900.
  • The “Define Policy for Recovery Segment” logic is invoked, STEP 902. An example of this logic is described above and in a U.S. patent application “Programmatic Validation in an Information Technology Environment,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/966,619, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • Using the BR Eclipse plugin, the BR Administrator has the option to validate the new goal policy, INQUIRY 904. If no, processing completes. Otherwise, processing continues as described below.
  • The “Validate Policy for Recovery Segment” logic is invoked, STEP 906. One embodiment for providing validation is described above and in, for instance, a U.S. patent application “Programmatic Validation in an Information Technology Environment,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/966,619, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • If as a result of the “Validate Policy for Recovery Segment” logic it is determined that the policy has been properly validated and the policy is achievable, INQUIRY 908, the BR Administrator has the option to prepare the new policy, INQUIRY 910. If no, processing completes. Otherwise, processing continues, as described below.
  • The “Prepare Policy for Recovery Segment” logic is invoked, STEP 912. One implementation for preparing a prepare workflow or process is described herein and in, for instance, a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,951, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • Using the BR Eclipse plugin the BR Administrator has the option to modify the prepare workflow, INQUIRY 914. If desired, the Modify Prepare Workflow routine is invoked, STEP 916. In one implementation, this flow is as described below and in a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,951, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. For instance, modification of a prepare workflow is achieved through UI interaction in which the proposed workflow and valid prepare operations on resources associated with the RS is presented. Customer selection of valid prepare operations to be included in the prepare workflow or to be removed from the workflow continues until the modified prepare workflow contains the desired operations. The modified set of operations are then evaluated for dependencies and placed in order for execution as the modified prepare workflow.
  • Thereafter, or if modify prepare is not to be invoked, using the BR Eclipse plugin, the BR Administrator has the option to generate the delta workflow for the new policy, INQUIRY 918 (FIG. 9B). If no, processing completes. Otherwise, the Generate Delta Workflow routine is invoked, STEP 920. One example of this logic is described below.
  • If there are errors from the generation of the delta workflow, INQUIRY 922, a mailbox notification is provided, STEP 924, and processing completes. Otherwise, processing continues, as described herein.
  • The delta workflow is a programmatic difference between two workflows, and thus, is not modified, in this example. (Instead, the prepare workflow generated in STEP 914 can be modified). As a result, the BR Administrator has the option to accept, but not change, the delta workflow, INQUIRY 926. If no, processing completes. Otherwise, it continues as described herein.
  • Using the BR Eclipse plugin, the BR Administrator has the option to submit the delta workflow, INQUIRY 928. If no, processing completes. Otherwise, a transaction is started for the case where the RS structures are maintained in a relational DBMS like DB2®, STEP 930, and the submit delta workflow routine is invoked, STEP 932. One implementation of this logic is described in a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Generation of Processes in Computing Environments” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,894, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
  • Submitting the delta workflow may utilize processing which incorporates monitoring activities to determine the status of operation and workflow completion. Monitoring activities before and after each workflow invoked operation may determine, based on run time conditions, if the operation is to be invoked and may record operation execution time, as well as record successful or unsuccessful execution of the operation. On completion of the workflow, data on operation execution may be returned enabling update of BR metadata associated with the preparatory operations.
  • The workflow is monitored for success. If unsuccessful, in one example, an undo workflow is created, executed and monitored to undo the changes of the delta workflow.
  • Thereafter, the corresponding GOAL_POLICY table is updated as follows, STEP 934:
    • DELTA_WF_ID is set to the ID of the delta workflow DELTA_WF_BPEL as it has been persisted in the WORKFLOW table.
    • The list of operations to be executed by the preparatory workflow P1_OP_LIST is set to OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P1 (returned from the Generate Delta Workflow routine invoked at STEP 920).
    • The list of operations to be executed when the policy is made actively managed by BR P2_OP_LIST is set to OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P2 (a.k.a., phase one activate operation list) (returned from the Generate Delta Workflow routine invoked at STEP 920).
    • The list of operations to undo the preparatory workflow P1_UNDO_OP_LIST is set to OP_ORDER_UNDO_WF_LIST_P1 (returned from the Generate Delta Workflow routine invoked at STEP 920).
  • The transaction is committed, STEP 936.
  • Using the BR Eclipse plugin the BR Administrator has the option to switch to the new policy, INQUIRY 938. If no, processing completes. Otherwise, processing continues, as described below.
    • The Recovery_Segment DB2® table for the RS for which the policy was changed is updated to point to the new policy as follows, STEP 940 (FIG. 9C):
      • CHANGED_POLICY_ID=POLICY_ID of the new policy.
    • Moreover, RS monitoring is invoked, in one example, STEP 942. As an example, RS monitoring includes:
      • From the resources associated with the RS build DAG(s).
      • From the root to the leaf node(s) in the DAG, create RS.BRAD_list.
        • Resource state data to be collected.
        • Resource operation data to be collected.
      • Subscribe to events listed in RS.BRAD_list.
        Generate Delta Workflow

One embodiment of the logic to generate a delta workflow is described with reference to FIGS. 10A-10B. In one example, this logic is invoked via the BR Administrator interface when changing the BR RTO goal policy of a business application (i.e., Recovery Segment) that already has a goal policy in place, being monitored, and being enforced.

• For illustration purposes, these terms are utilized in this logic to denote the inputs:
  • Recovery Segment denoted as RS.
  • Current policy for that RS.
  • Current policy prepare workflow.
  • Current policy prepare workflow ordered list of operations denoted as OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_CUR, where each entry includes a specific resource and a specific operation on that resource.
  • New policy for the RS.
  • New policy prepare workflow.
  • New policy prepare workflow ordered list of operations denoted as OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_NEW, where each entry includes a specific resource and a specific operation on that resource
• Referring to FIG. 10A, some of the various output structures to be returned by this logic are allocated (others are allocated by other megaflow tasks), STEP 1000. For instance:
  • Delta BPEL workflow denoted as DELTA_WF_BPEL.
  • Delta workflow ordered list of operations, denoted as OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_DELTA.
• The ordered list of operations is traversed for the new prepare workflow. For each operation in the list OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_NEW, STEP 1002:
  • Read without serialization the BRMD entry for that operation, STEP 1004. Check to see if the operation is in the current prepare workflow OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_CUR, INQUIRY 1006:
    • If No, check the metadata associated with the operation to see if supports a non-disruptive change, INQUIRY 1008:
      • If No, set RC to disruptive, STEP 1010, and processing completes.
      • If Yes, add the operation to the ordered list of operations for the delta workflow OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_DELTA, STEP 1012, and iterate.
    • Returning to INQUIRY 1006, if Yes, check to see if all values and parameters for the operation in list OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_NEW are the same for the operation that exists in the current prepare workflow OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_CUR, INQUIRY 1014:
      • If Yes, iterate.
      • If No, check to see if the operation is more stringent than the operation in the current prepare workflow OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_CUR, INQUIRY 1016:
        • If Yes, add the operation to the ordered list of operations for the delta workflow OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_DELTA, STEP 1018, and iterate, STEP 1002.
        • If No, send a mailbox notification to the BR Administrator that the resource will be left in a more stringently prepared state if the delta workflow is executed, STEP 1020, and iterate, STEP 1002.

After the ordered list of operations for the new prepare workflow, OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_NEW, has been traversed, the delta workflow has been populated in OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_DELTA. That delta workflow is to be split into two categories, in this example: prepare time (i.e., P1) and 1st phase activate time (i.e., P2). The “Split Prepare Workflow” logic is invoked, STEP 1022 (FIG. 10B). One implementation of this logic is described below and in “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,951, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.

As one example, the following steps are performed to split the workflow:

• • Build a DAG from prep operations returned.
  • For each resource, operation pair in the DAG:
    • If the resource, operation has associated data from the BRMD indicating it is eligible to be a phase 1 activate operation:
      • If any pairing exists for an operation which is to precede or follow the proposed phase 1 activate operation or any undo operation associated with the proposed phase 1 activate operation:
        • Notify the BR administrator that the proposed phase 1 activate operation is to remain a prep operation.
        • Place the operation in the (OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P1).
      • Otherwise, move the proposed phase 1 activate operation to a phase 1 activate list of operations (OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P2).
    • Otherwise place operation in the prepare operation list (OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P1).

The output from this flow is two ordered list of operations:

• • 1. Prepare time ordered list of operations denoted by OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P1.
  • 2. 1st phase activate time list of operations denoted by OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P2.

After the delta workflow is split, an undo ordered list of operations is created for the OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P1 list, by invoking the “Op Order Undo” logic, STEP 1024. One implementation of this logic is described herein and in a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,951, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.

For example:

• • (1) For each input resource, operation pair:
    • Find operations which are to occur just before the specified resource, operation pair.
    • Add the found preceding resource, operation pair to the end of the input list.
    • Find operation execution time for the added resource, operation pair for the PSE being used.
    • Convert the operation ordering pairing from a before pairing to an after pairing.
  • (2) For each resource, operation pair in the list:
    • Find the operation ordering pairings which specify an after operation ordering relationship.
    • Add found after resource, operation pair to the end of the input list.
  • (3) Form a set of operations in the resource, operation list which are not referenced in any operation ordering after pairing:
    • Assign the formed set the next sequence number for operation ordering.
    • Remove the formed set from the resource, operation list and add to the output ordered operation list.
    • If the resource, operation list is not now null, repeat step 3.
  • (4) For each operation in the ordered list:
    • Find operations occurring just after.
    • Add found operations to the operation after entry for the resource, operation they are to immediately follow.

The output from this logic is an Undo Prepare time ordered list of operations denoted by OP_ORDER_UNDO_WF_LIST_P1.

Subsequent to generating the undo ordered lists of operations, a check for dependencies between operations to be done at 1st phase active time and operations not done at 1st phase active time. For each operation in the list OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P2, STEP 1026:

• • Read the BRRD table searching for an operation ordering pairing where the resource/operation is the first or second entry in the pairing, INQUIRY 1028.
    • If Yes, set RC to a dependency error, STEP 1030, and send a mailbox notification to the BR Administrator indicating that the metadata associated with the resource and operation may need revising from 1st phase activate time to prepare time, STEP 1032. Processing completes.
    • If No, iterate, STEP 1026.

After the search for dependencies in OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P2 is complete, STEP 1026, a Gantt chart for the delta workflow is generated. The “Build Gantt Chart” logic is invoked using the prepare time ordered list of operations OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P1, STEP 1034. One implementation of this logic is described below and in a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Selection of Actions in an Information Technology Environment” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,951, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.

In one example, processing is performed in, for instance, two phases. In the first phase, a table is built that includes one row for each unique path through the sequence of operations. The input ordered_op_list is indexed by the variable i_order_op_list. The result of phase one processing is a table, outlist_table. An index, i_next_avail_row, indicates the row within outlist_table where the next unique sequence through the set of operations is to be built. Processing proceeds by locating each input operation with the lowest operations sequence number. Each of these is a root of unique paths through the set of operations. The set of these operations is processed sequentially with unique paths through the set of operations for the first root completing before processing the unique paths through the set of operations for the second root.

Processing for a root begins by assigning the current row in the outlist_table to the index, current_orow_index, and incrementing the i_next_avail_row index. Within the row being processed, an index to the current operation being processed is maintained, index_for_ops. Processing proceeds through the list of operations in the input. A new row is created in outlist_table when more than one input operation is to occur after the current operation being processed. Two indicators are kept with each row of the outlist_table in, for instance, a header column. Header includes, for instance, a row_changed indicator and a row_end indicator. The row_changed indicator is used to cause a copy of the row to be made before a new operation which is to occur later in the sequence is added. Associated with each row are two fields used to save progress in processing the sequence: an ordered_op_next field, which includes an index into the input ordered_op_list for the last operation in the sequence; and an op_next field, which includes an index into the row for the last operation in the sequence. Entries in the row include an index into the input ordered_op_list for operations comprising the sequence.

When a new row is created, it is initialized with the sequence of operations in the current row that have been accumulated to that point of processing. The second indicator associated with each row, row_end, is used to identify a row which is a complete path through the sequence of operations.

The next row is processed in the same manner as the first row of a root. Processing for a root is determined to have recorded every unique path through the sequence of operations when there were no copied rows made during processing of the current row. When the unique paths through the set of operations for the first root has completed, processing continues with the second and subsequent roots.

The second phase of processing builds the output of the routine, Gantt_table and maxtime. The maximum time for execution of the sequence of operations is set in maxtime. The Gantt_table includes one row for each opentry in the ordered_op_list input. An entry in the Gantt_table includes, for example, the opentry provided as input, a start time relative to 0, and an end time relative to 0 for the operation.

The prepare time ordered list of operations OP_ORDER_WF_LIST_P1 is also used to create the delta workflow in BPEL format by invoking the “Build Prep Workflow” task, STEP 1036. One implementation of this logic is described herein and in a U.S. patent application “Dynamic Generation of Processes in Computing Environments”, U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,894, Bobak et al., which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.

For example, processing performed by the Build WF routine may include:

• • For each resource, operation in the input list:
    • Invoke workflow services to add a preliminary monitoring routine which will establish a basis for operation execution time.
      • Input to the preliminary monitoring routine to include of the resource operation to be performed.
      • Input to the workflow service including the order, relative to the set of operations, for this operation.
  • When the preliminary monitor routine is invoked just prior to a resource operation:
    • Determine from current resource data if the operation is to be executed.
    • If not, exit.
    • Otherwise, save the starting time for the operation.
    • Invoke the resource operation.
    • Save the completion time and execution time duration for the resource operation.
    • Save the completion status for the resource operation.
  • When the last list operation of the workflow has been reached:
    • Return resource operation execution time data.
  • Continuing with the processing of FIG. 10B, next, a check is made for errors from the “Build Prep Workflow” task, INQUIRY 1038:
    • If No, return the delta workflow, the list of operations for the delta workflow, the list of operations for the 1st phase activate, and the delta undo ordered list of operations, STEP 1040, and processing completes.
    • If Yes, set RC to WF build error, STEP 1042, and processing completes.
      Further Implementation

In a further implementation, the stringency of a prepared resource is reduced (i.e., to lower the expected preparedness to meet a lower RTO). This is initiated by the BR Administrator explicitly, or in response to a change policy that caused a potential lowering of the stringency to be skipped in favor of preserving the running environment without disruption (e.g., mailbox notification from STEP 1020 in Generate Delta Workflow).

In one implementation reducing the stringency (i.e., to lower the expected preparedness to meet a lower RTO) of a shared resource (i.e., resource included in multiple Recovery Segments) is a megaflow and follows the pattern described in a U.S. patent application “Adaptive Computer Sequencing of Actions,” U.S. Ser. No. 11/965,899, Bobak et al., co-filed herewith, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Alternatively, the customer may execute the individual tasks through invocation of the BR UI, or the individual tasks can be pieced together using nested transaction scopes if the selected runtime environment supports that concept. The individual tasks are as follows, and each is run in a transaction, but no overall transaction scope exists. In a further example, one or more of the tasks are non-transactional:

Task1: Find set of RS that include the resource.

Task2: Validate the set—see what impact the change may have.

Task3: Customer decides to prepare and lower the stringency.

Task4: For each RS potentially affected, UI offers customer option to validate the policy.

Megaflow Tasks Details

The input to this routine is, for instance, the resource for which the BR Administrator has chosen to lower the stringency. A temporary entry in the metadata entry for that resource (i.e., BRMD) includes the lower stringency.

• • In one example, the logic finds the Recovery Segments with preparatory operations on that resource.
    • For those Recovery Segments, it finds the current policy and the last executed preparatory workflow for that policy and checks the prepare workflow ordered list of operations to see if that RS issues any prepare operations on that resource.
  • For those Recovery Segments that issue prepare operations on that resource, it allows the BR Administrator to test the modification of the prepare operation for the resource by validating all of the Recovery Segments that would be involved. The BR Administrator then picks the operation that will be the “presumed” operation for the prepare operation of the resource (to be stored in the temporary entry in the BRMD data for that resource).
  • The Recovery Segments that share the resource then report back on RTO achievability given this selection of the “presumed” operation. That is achieved by actually validating the policy for each Recovery Segment.
  • Based on the RTO achievability returned from the policy validations, the BR Administrator can then decide whether the stringency can be permanently lowered or not for that particular resource.

Described in detail herein is a capability for non-disruptively changing an IT environment based on a change in goal for one or more business applications of the 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 FIG. 11. A computer program product 1100 includes, for instance, one or more computer usable media 1102 to store computer readable program code means or logic 1104 thereon to provide and facilitate one or more aspects of the present invention. The medium can be an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system (or apparatus or device) or a propagation medium. Examples of a computer readable medium include a semiconductor or solid state memory, magnetic tape, a removable computer diskette, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), a rigid magnetic disk and an optical disk. Examples of optical disks include compact disk-read only memory (CD-ROM), compact disk-read/write (CD-R/W) and DVD.

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 non-disruptively providing a process to effect a change in an IT environment responsive to a change in policy. During the change to the environment, management to the existing goal is continued. Advantageously, the capability enables dynamic switching to the new goal non-disruptively for the business application, such that explicit deactivation of the old policy and explicit activation of the new policy are not typically required.

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.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method of managing changes within an information technology (IT) environment, said method comprising:

obtaining, by a processor, a change in a goal for an overall business application of the IT environment, the business application comprising a plurality of resources and one or more relationships between resources which provide the function of the business application, and the goal being a management goal associated with the plurality of resources used to support the business application, the management goal comprising one of an availability goal, a performance goal or other management goal for the business application, wherein the goal is to be changed to provide a new goal while continuing to enforce an existing goal;

generating, by the processor, a delta workflow to reflect one or more changes to the IT environment to enable achievement of the new goal, the delta workflow providing a programmatic difference between a current prepare workflow for the existing goal and a new prepare workflow for the new goal, the generating comprising:

traversing a list of operations for the new prepare workflow, wherein each operation is associated with a resource, and for an operation in the list of operations, determining whether the operation is in the current prepare workflow;

based on the operation not being in the current prepare workflow, checking whether the operation in the new prepare workflow supports a non-disruptive change, wherein the operation supports a non-disruptive change when the operation can be performed without impact to an existing state, and

based on the operation supporting a non-disruptive change, adding the operation to the delta workflow;

based on the operation being a disruptive change, the operation is not added to the delta workflow;

based on the operation being in the current prepare workflow, checking whether one or more of values and parameters for the operation in the new prepare workflow match the one or more values and parameters for the operation in the current prepare workflow;

based on the checking indicating a mismatch, determining whether the operation of the new prepare workflow is more stringent in being prepared to meet the new goal than the operation in the current prepare workflow is in being prepared to meet the new goal, and

 based on determining the operation of the new prepare workflow is more stringent for being prepared to meet the new goal, adding the operation of the new prepare workflow to the delta workflow, and

 based on determining the operation of the new prepare workflow is not more stringent in being prepared to meet the new goal, indicating that execution of the delta workflow results in being more prepared to meet the new goal; and

executing the delta workflow to facilitate achievement of the new goal.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining whether the new prepare workflow is to be modified; and

based on determining the new prepare workflow is to be modified, modifying the new prepare workflow.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising dividing operations in the delta workflow into a set of operations to be executed in advance of activating a policy to meet the new goal and a set of operations to be executed based on activating the policy.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the goal comprises a quantifiable goal for the plurality of resources of the business application, the quantifiable goal being apportioned among the plurality of resources of the business application.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the business application is represented by a Recovery Segment, and wherein the goal is associated with the Recovery Segment and is used in managing the business application.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising subsequent to executing the delta workflow, assessing whether the delta workflow completed successfully, and based on completing successfully providing an option of making the new goal a current existing goal.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 6, wherein based on the delta workflow completing unsuccessfully, initiating an undo process to undo changes of the delta workflow.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising evaluating achievability of the new goal.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising determining an ordering of operations and any dependent operations in the delta workflow.

10. A computer program product of managing changes within an information technology (IT) environment, said computer program product comprising:

a non-transitory computer readable storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for execution by the processing circuit for performing a method comprising:

obtaining, by a processor, a change in a goal for an overall business application of the IT environment, the business application comprising a plurality of resources and one or more relationships between resources which provide the function of the business application, and the goal being a management goal associated with the plurality of resources used to support the business application, the management goal comprising one of an availability goal, a performance goal or other management goal for the business application, wherein the goal is to be changed to provide a new goal while continuing to enforce an existing goal;

generating, by the processor, a delta workflow to reflect one or more changes to the IT environment to enable achievement of the new goal, the delta workflow providing a programmatic difference between a current prepare workflow for the existing goal and a new prepare workflow for the new goal, the generating comprising:

traversing a list of operations for the new prepare workflow, wherein each operation is associated with a resource, and for an operation in the list of operations, determining whether the operation is in the current prepare workflow;

based on the operation not being in the current prepare workflow, checking whether the operation in the new prepare workflow supports a non-disruptive change, wherein the operation supports a non-disruptive change when the operation can be performed without impact to an existing state, and

based on the operation supporting a non-disruptive change, adding the operation to the delta workflow;

based on the operation being a disruptive change, the operation is not added to the delta workflow;

based on the operation being in the current prepare workflow, checking whether one or more of values and parameters for the operation in the new prepare workflow match the one or more values and parameters for the operation in the current prepare workflow;

based on the checking indicating a mismatch, determining whether the operation of the new prepare workflow is more stringent in being prepared to meet the new goal than the operation in the current prepare workflow is in being prepared to meet the new goal, and

 based on determining the operation of the new prepare workflow is more stringent for being prepared to meet the new goal, adding the operation of the new prepare workflow to the delta workflow, and

 based on determining the operation of the new prepare workflow is not more stringent in being prepared to meet the new goal, indicating that execution of the delta workflow results in being more prepared to meet the new goal; and

executing the delta workflow to facilitate achievement of the new goal.

11. The computer program product of claim 10, wherein the method further comprises:

determining whether the new prepare workflow is to be modified; and

based on determining the new prepare workflow is to be modified, modifying the new prepare workflow.

12. The computer program product of claim 10, wherein the method further comprises dividing operations in the delta workflow into a set of operations to be executed in advance of activating a policy to meet the new goal and a set of operations to be executed based on activating the policy.

13. The computer program product of claim 10, wherein the method further comprises subsequent to executing the delta workflow, assessing whether the delta workflow completed successfully, and based on completing successfully providing an option of making the new goal a current existing goal.

14. The computer program product of claim 13, wherein based on the delta workflow completing unsuccessfully, initiating an undo process to undo changes of the delta workflow.

15. A computer system of managing changes within an information technology (IT) environment, said computer system comprising:

a memory;

a processor in communications with the memory, wherein the computer system is configured to perform a method, said method comprising:

obtaining a change in a goal for an overall business application of the IT environment, the business application comprising a plurality of resources and one or more relationships between resources which provide the function of the business application, and the goal being a management goal associated with the plurality of resources used to support the business application, the management goal comprising one of an availability goal, a performance goal or other management goal for the business application, wherein the goal is to be changed to provide a new goal while continuing to enforce an existing goal;

generating a delta workflow to reflect one or more changes to the IT environment to enable achievement of the new goal, the delta workflow providing a programmatic difference between a current prepare workflow for the existing goal and a new prepare workflow for the new goal, the generating comprising:

traversing a list of operations for the new prepare workflow, wherein each operation is associated with a resource, and for an operation in the list of operations, determining whether the operation is in the current prepare workflow;

based on the operation not being in the current prepare workflow, checking whether the operation in the new prepare workflow supports a non-disruptive change, wherein the operation supports a non-disruptive change when the operation can be performed without impact to an existing state, and

based on the operation supporting a non-disruptive change, adding the operation to the delta workflow;

based on the operation being a disruptive change, the operation is not added to the delta workflow;

based on the operation being in the current prepare workflow, checking whether one or more of values and parameters for the operation in the new prepare workflow match the one or more values and parameters for the operation in the current prepare workflow;

based on the checking indicating a mismatch, determining whether the operation of the new prepare workflow is more stringent in being prepared to meet the new goal than the operation in the current prepare workflow is in being prepared to meet the new goal, and

 based on determining the operation of the new prepare workflow is more stringent for being prepared to meet the new goal, adding the operation of the new prepare workflow to the delta workflow, and

 based on determining the operation of the new prepare workflow is not more stringent in being prepared to meet the new goal, indicating that execution of the delta workflow results in being more prepared to meet the new goal; and

executing the delta workflow to facilitate achievement of the new goal.

16. The computer program product of claim 10, further comprising determining an ordering of operations and any dependent operations in the delta workflow.

17. The computer system of claim 15, wherein the method further comprises:

determining whether the new prepare workflow is to be modified; and

based on determining the new prepare workflow is to be modified, modifying the new prepare workflow.

18. The computer system of claim 15, wherein the method further comprises dividing operations in the delta workflow into a set of operations to be executed in advance of activating a policy to meet the new goal and a set of operations to be executed based on activating the policy.

19. The computer system of claim 15, wherein the method further comprises subsequent to executing the delta workflow, assessing whether the delta workflow completed successfully, and based on completing successfully providing an option of making the new goal a current existing goal.

20. The computer system of claim 15, further comprising determining an ordering of operations and any dependent operations in the delta workflow.