White Papers

Agility™ - Service Agreements for the Cloud

At Arjuna we believe that IT services will increasingly be delivered by a complex, interconnected network of federated service providers. Providers will consume services from each other, organisations will cooperate together to share services to mutual advantage, service brokerage and trading will be commonplace.

Arjuna Technologies have focused their efforts on this particular problem for a number of years and have developed ‘Agility’, a framework for the management of dynamic service agreements and of policy that responds to the creation, modification, maintenance and deletion of those agreements. Agility enables organisations to connect together (internally and/or externally) into a Federated Cloud - delivering cooperation with accountability and control.

Agility is the glue for the Federated Cloud.

Download white paper (0.4MB)

Analysis of Power-Saving Techniques over a Large Multi-use Cluster

Reduction of power consumption for any computer system is now an important issue, although this should be done in a manner that is not detrimental to the user base. We present a number of policies that can be applied to multi-use clusters where computers are shared between interactive users and high-throughput computing. We evaluate policies by trace-driven simulations in order to determine the effects on power consumed and impact on high-throughput users. We demonstrate that these policies could save ~60% more energy for the high-throughput jobs over our current cluster policies.

Available from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=6118760

Intelligent Power Management over Large Clusters

There is a growing tension within large organisations such as universities between the desire to perform vast amounts of computational processing and the desire to reduce power consumption by switching off computers. This situation will only worsen as computational problems get larger and the desire to save energy escalates. Through careful management of computing resources it is possible to maximise effective computer usage whilst minimising power consumption though this can be costly in terms of human effort. We present our work with the Agility Cloud Computing Platform to provide intelligent control over a University-wide Condor system, which works to reduce power consumption without adversely affecting the Condor users. This system also provides auditing of the power usage, which can be used to determine the power efficiency of the Condor system.

Available from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5724816

Arjuna Agility™ - Removing the Barriers to Business Agility

In the future, competitive success will belong to organizations that are able to cope with rapid external and internal changes – organizations that can demonstrate 'Business Agility'.

Business Agility: "An organization's ability to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change." Gartner

There are many factors that can contribute towards business agility and one of them is Information Technology. Whilst it is widely recognized that IT has a key role to play in enabling the ‘sense’ and ‘responding’ components of business agility it is also clear that IT can hinder agility through monolithic architectures and siloed applications and information.

Arjuna’s forthcoming product, Arjuna Agility™ (Agility) enables business agility by creating an ‘internal cloud’ of computing resource within the enterprise.

Download white paper (0.9MB)

Reliable IT for the 'Agile Enterprise'

This paper gives an overview of the trends driving agile IT, and shows why supporting enterprise applications within a highly agile system raises difficult problems. In particular, increased, dynamic data sharing can have severe consequences for the reliability of the agile enterprise. Failure to address these problems will significantly restrict the ability of the new emerging infrastructures, such as Grid computing and Extreme Transaction Processing, to fully address the goals of agility and cost-reduction. Investment in solutions which do not support data sharing in enterprise applications will prevent enterprises from obtaining full value from their most valuable asset - their data.