Using Formal Ontology Representation and Alignment Strategies to Enhance Resource Integration in Multi Vendor Autonomic Environments

The success of the autonomic computing vision [KephartO3] relies in its capacity of correlating heterogeneous resources such as databases, switches, routers, server systems, load balancers, Web servers and/or application servers are just a few possibilities of resources that coexist in a data center today. These resources are provided by multiple vendors, and consequently implement different manageability interfaces. This multiplicity of resources also requires an ecosystem of multiple different management applications, delivered by a number of different management application vendors. Many of these vendors are now re-engineering their management infrastructure to become more autonomic and achieve the inherent value associated to a more independent management solution. Unfortunately many of the existing autonomic capabilities today are point solutions that are not easily integrated in a multi-vendor environment, nor emphasize the necessary collaboration. A true multi-vendor autonomic solution would enable the sharing and reuse of management information between heterogeneous management applications. In this paper we argue in favor of formalizing resource representations in a way that allows for automatic negotiation and integration of heterogeneous resources. We propose the use of formal ontology as a conceptual model in which to represent IT resources and present CATO, an ontology integration engine developed to provide semantic interoperability among resources in a heterogeneous environment