Leveraging public resource pools to improve the service compliances of computing utilities

Abstract

Computing utilities are emerging as an important part of the infrastructure for outsourcing computer services. One of the major objectives of computing utilities is to maximize their net profit while maintaining customer loyalty in accordance with the service level agreements (SLAs). Defining the SLAs conservatively might be one easy way to achieve SLA compliance, but this results in underutilization of resources and loss of revenue in turn. In this paper, we show that inducting unreliable public resources into a computing utility enables more competetive SLAs while maintaining higher level of runtime compliance as well as maximizing profit. © Springer-Verlag 2004.