Grid, Management and Self-Management

Increasingly frequently, Grid software is being proposed as a software platform for operational management of enterprise computing systems, including desktops, data centres and business applications. We argue in this paper that the challenge for future management software is ‘enabling automated and business-driven management, for systems with increasing scale, heterogeneity and federation challenges’. Among the currently available middlewares, the Grid platform is undoubtedly best positioned to respond to this challenge, and we review several recent technologies that utilize Grid software for management purposes. However, Grid software also has its limitations. Its software architecture provides no particular support to building self-managing distributed systems and is therefore most viable for traditional hierarchical management systems, providing rudimentary self-management capabilities through control loops.