ICorpMaker: Instant corporation maker

Motivation

For small and medium sized Internet businesses, making content such as games, movies, and merchandise rapidly available to customers with quality of service as a differentiator is of key importance. The business processes of these companies tend to favor rapidly changing, short lifetime content for competitive reasons. This and the relatively small size of such companies provide little incentive for them to own their own server and network infrastructure. Instead, these companies depend on buying services from ASPs (application service providers). From the ASPs point of view, these businesses are viewed as a source of additional revenue, however only if provisioning and maintenance of services can be done in a cost-effective manner. ASPs can lower their operations costs by sharing its resources, e.g., servers and networks, among its customers and by automating as many of the provisioning services as possible. Flexibility by which a customer can introduce a service will be an important differentiator for an ASP.

Service provisioning and deployment.

In the following, we describe the problem space we are addressing in our research with an example. There is an increasing trend to provide computer games that can be played over the Internet among multiple users. The providers of these distributed games are typically small companies without the necessary means to maintain own web presence. Games can be played at levels of quality, e.g., gold, and users are charged accordingly. Each session (game) is of a short duration. As shown above, there are five main steps involved in making the game available:

1. Service introduction: the content provider, e.g., a computer game company, uses the ASP web site to make its new game (content) available to its customers. This step defines the content, e.g., its type, actual executable; different service levels to be offered to customers when they select the game, e.g., “gold game with maximum 10 users, 5 second maximum response time, 15 Mbytes of server space”; and other contractual details such as how customers would be charged.

2. Service install: ASP installs the content and the associated configuration information in the servers and the network. For example, it defines and sets the policies that will be enforced when the game will be invoked; sets up a web site for the content provider from where the game would be accessible to players.

3. Service invocation: the customer selects the game from the web site, including the level of the game as well as the game partners.

4. Service initiation: ASP’s management system initiates an instance of the game by allocating resources across its networks and servers, according to the pre-defined service levels.

5. Service monitoring: Instrumentation within the network and servers collect data that can be used by the ASP to monitor the provided service levels, as well as by the content provider and ASP to charge for used services.

Each of these steps is complex, involving multiple operations across heterogeneous resources and technologies. Automation of all or part of any of these steps will enable ASPs to cut costs and attract a significant customer base that is interested in rapid deployment of its content on the network.

Our approach

Instant Corporation Maker, or ICorpMaker, is our approach to the dynamic creation of network-based services. Using distributed systems and network management, our goal is to create an infrastructure that enables provisioning of services across heterogeneous networks and servers with end-to-end performance requirements. We are working with Tivoli Systems, in particular with Tivoli Millennium development and the Tivoli Service Provider Business Unit (SPBU). Within an ASP two types of infrastructure are provisioned, networks and servers. Our current work on the ICorpMaker allows dynamic provisioning of both in an integrated way.

Network: ICorpMaker creates a lightweight virtual network, LVN, interconnecting the servers assigned to the clients and the appropriate edge routers through which end-users will access the service. The amount of capacity allocated to the LVN is consummate with the level of service that the content providers require and is ready to pay for.

Servers: ICorpMaker creates one or more virtual servers on physical servers within its infrastructures running a set of client defined applications. The size of the virtual servers is again consummate with the amount of service levels that the client is prepared to pay. A client's virtual servers are protected from all other virtual servers running within the same infrastructure protecting a client from intentional or malicious attack. As both the allocated network and servers resources allocated to a client are virtual, they may be varied over time as clients needs evolve.