System Management with IBM Mobile Systems Remote: A Question of Power and Scale

The rise of the app revolution has brought small, simple, and affordable software tools to users for mastering mundane tasks with the help of mobile devices. With the success of the app paradigm, there is an increasing demand for applying the same spirit to problems which have traditionally been the domain of enterprise-scale solutions, e.g., system management. The challenge for building such communication-intensive applications, however, is to gather the health and performance data of a large number of machines in an agile and responsive fashion while being restricted by the scarce resources and severe power constraints inherent to mobile devices. In this paper, we present a system architecture that tackles this fundamental challenge by making data freshness an explicit concern and allowing the application to express its freshness requirements in a fine-grained way. The application runs atop a generic data cache and collection engine that fetches fresh data from the management endpoints based on these requirements. We evaluate the performance and power consumption characteristics on a broad range of Android-based mobile devices and show that this approach increases the responsiveness of the application while at the same time reducing the power consumption.