There are many areas and domains where the techniques developed for policy based technologies can be applied. Some of the areas where policies can be used to advantage are described on this page. Policies can also be applied to many other areas, and the list is intended to be illustrative, rather than exhaustive.

SANs

Storage Area Networks (SANs) define a new storage paradigm that allows storage to be shared among servers via fast interconnect such as Fibre Channel or Gigabit Ethernet. By sharing storage using SANs, storage management cost is reduced and overall data availability is improved. SANs are complex systems consisting of multiple servers each with multiple hardware and software components and storage devices of various types with multiple different parameters. Due to the inherent complexity of SAN and heterogeneity in device types from various vendors, designing a SAN, which can satisfy high level requirements from customers while optimizing the system and management cost, is a challenging problem. To address this issue, we leverage the policy-based guidance in SAN designing process so that the SAN planner generates host/storage/fabric/zone design plans that satisfy high level requirements from the users in terms of configuration, interoperability constraints, and reliability and security of data. In our SAN planning system, policies are used to represent the configuration constraints or design guidelines that have been specified to meet the high level design goals, and are access by the planner's core SAN design algorithm. On the flip side, policies can ease the difficulty of SAN management by automatically checking for inconsistencies in hardware or software configuration of a deployed SAN, or detecting violations of device interoperability rules. This process is called as the policy-based SAN configuration validation. For SAN validation, SAN monitoring and management tools such as Tivoli SAN manager reads out device and link information from the target SAN, store them in a standard SMI-S format in a database. This configuration data will be processed by the SAN validator, which scans them over to evaluate against SAN configuration policies. If the SAN validator detects configuration errors it will alert the human administrator, and can optionally initiate actions to automatically fix the problem. This project is a joint effort with IBM Almaden Research, Tivoli Storage Group, and IBM Software Group.

VoIP Application

The objective of this project, a joint effort with Debanjan Saha’s group, is to develop a conferencing framework that provides better conference performance by optimizing the use of conference resources, as well as better user experiences by enabling instantaneous multiparty collaboration.

Policy analysis project

Understanding and controlling the overall effect of policies is particularly important in a distributed system, where a policy author may only have a partial view of the entire system and multiple authors may write policies for the same set of resources without coordination. Since policies can interact with each other, this interaction often results in undesirable effects if conflicting actions are not resolved prior to policy enforcement. The aim of the policy analysis project is to develop a policy analysis toolkit that provides policy managers/authors a formal process to certify the “correctness” of a policy before the policy is activated. The toolkit implements various of advanced analysis methods to perform policy dominance check, simultaneous applicability check, coverage check, conflict detection/resolution and priority advisory functions.