Statistical service assurances for applications in utility grid environments

We focus on techniques to support admission control and advance resource reservation for applications acquiring information technology (IT) resources from utility grid environments. Utility grid environments offer programmatic access to resources for complex multi-tier applications. In particular we consider business applications which require resources continuously but that have resource demands that change regularly based on factors such as time of day and day of week. We present a statistical demand profile approach for characterizing time varying application resource requirements along with a method that provides statistical assurances regarding the number of resources needed to satisfy the combined requirements of many applications over time. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with a case study that uses resource utilization information from 48 data center servers. Simulation experiments explore the sensitivity of the assurances to correlations between application resource demands and the precision of the demand profiles.