AutoGlobe: An automatic administration concept for service-oriented database applications

Future database application systems will be designed as Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) like SAP's NetWeaver instead of monolithic software systems such as SAP's R/3. The decomposition in finer-grained services allows the usage of hardware clusters and a flexible service-to-server allocation but also increases the complexity of administration. Thus, new administration techniques like our self-organizing infrastructure that we developed in cooperation with the SAP Adaptive Computing Infrastructure (ACI) group are necessary. For our purpose the available hardware is virtualized, pooled, and monitored. A fuzzy logic based controller module supervises all services running on the hardware platform and remedies exceptional situations automatically. With this self-organizing infrastructure we reduce the necessary hardware and administration overhead and, thus, lower the total cost of ownership (TCO). We used our prototype implementation, called Auto-Globe, for SAP-internal tests and we performed comprehensive simulation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed concept.