Determining an availability score based on available resources of different resource types in a distributed computing environment of storage servers to determine whether to perform a failure operation for one of the storage servers

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9411698-B2
Application number	US-201414289333-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	May 28, 2014
Priority date	May 28, 2014
Publication date	Aug 9, 2016
Grant date	Aug 9, 2016

Abstract

Provided are a computer program product, system, and method for a computer program product, system, and method for determining an availability score based on available resources of different resource types in a distributed computing environment of storage servers to determine whether to perform a failure operation for one of the storage servers. A health status monitor program deployed in the storage servers performs: maintaining information indicating availability of a plurality of storage server resources for a plurality of resource types; calculating an availability score as a function of a number of available resources of the resource types; and transmitting information on the availability score to a management program. The management program uses the transmitted information to determine whether to migrate services from the storage server from which the availability score is received to at least one of the other storage servers in the distributed computing environment.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A computer program product for determining a health status of storage servers in a distributed computing environment, wherein the computer program product comprises a computer readable storage medium including:
a health status monitor program deployed in the storage servers, wherein the health status monitor program performs operations in each of the storage servers in which it is deployed, the operations comprising:
maintaining information indicating availability of a plurality of storage server resources for a plurality of resource types, wherein the storage servers provide access to computational services and data;
calculating an availability score as a function of a number of available storage server resources of the resource types; and
transmitting information on the availability score to a management program;

wherein the management program uses the transmitted information to determine whether to migrate at least one of the computational services and the data from a storage server of the storage servers from which the availability score is received to at least one other of the storage servers in the distributed computing environment.

2. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein the operations further comprise:
receiving an error with respect to one of the storage server resources of one of the resource types; and
indicating the storage server resource for which the error is detected as unavailable, wherein the availability score is calculated in response to determining that the storage server resource is unavailable.

3. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein the function for calculating the availability score considers for each of the resource types a number of the storage server resources that are available and a total number of the storage server resources for the resource type.

4. The computer program product of claim 3 , wherein the function calculates the availability score by multiplying a percentage of the number of the available storage server resources to total number of the storage server resources for each of the resource types.

5. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein the function for calculating the availability score additionally considers a number of recovery events resulting from Input/Output (I/O) requests and a total number of allowed recovery events.

6. The computer program product of claim 5 , wherein the function calculates the availability score by multiplying a percentage of the number of the available storage server resources to a total number of the storage server resources for reach of the resource types times one minus a percentage of the number of recovery events divided by the number of allowed recovery events.

7. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein the operations further comprise:
maintaining an association of ranges of availability scores to a plurality of severity levels; and
determining, from the calculated availability score, the severity level associated with the calculated availability score, wherein the transmitted information on the availability score comprises the determined severity level, and wherein the computational service of the storage server is migrated in response to the transmitted determined severity level comprising a highest severity level.

8. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein the operations further comprise:
determining whether the calculated availability score is equal to a previously calculated availability score, wherein the information on the availability score is transmitted in response to determining that the calculated availability score is not equal to the previously calculated availability score; and
setting the previously calculated availability score to the calculated availability score.

9. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein the distributed computing environment comprises a cloud computing environment, wherein the storage servers include the data and the computational services to provide to customers of the cloud computing environment, wherein the availability score is used to determine whether to migrate data and/or computational services from a specified storage server comprising the storage server for which the availability score is calculated to at least one available storage server comprising at least one of the storage servers not including the specified storage server.

10. The computer program product of claim 9 , wherein the to migrate the at least one of the computational services and the data from the storage server further comprises:
migrating critical computational services from the specified storage server to at least one of the available storage servers in response to determining that the availability score is associated with a highest severity level;
migrating semi-critical computational services from the specified storage server to at least one of the available storage servers in response to determining that the availability score is associated with a medium severity level or severity level higher than the medium severity level; and
migrating the data from the specified storage server to at least one of the available storage servers in response to determining that the availability score is associated with a low severity level or severity level higher than the low severity level.

11. The computer program product of claim 10 , wherein the operations further comprise:
receiving, by the management program an availability score or severity level indicating a non-severe level for the specified storage server after migrating computational services and/or data from the specified storage server to the at least one available storage server; and
migrating migrated computational services and/or data from the at least one available storage server back to the specified storage server in response to receiving the non-severe level in response to receiving the availability score or severity level indicating the non-severe level for the specified storage server after the migrating.

12. The computer program product of claim 9 , wherein the function comprises a first function, wherein the operations further comprise:
applying a second function to the availability scores for the storage servers in the cloud computing environment to determine a cloud health value; and
using the cloud health value to determine a cloud management message to transmit to an administrator of the cloud computing environment.

13. The computer program product of claim 12 , wherein the cloud health value comprises an average of the availability scores of the storage servers.

14. A system, comprising:
a management program; and
a plurality of storage servers in a distributed computing environment, wherein each storage server includes a computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therein that when executed by a processor perform operations, the operations comprising:
providing access to computational services and data
maintaining information indicating availability of a plurality of storage server resources for a plurality of resource types;
calculating an availability score as a function of a number of available storage server resources of the resource types; and
transmitting information on the availability score to a management program;

wherein the management program uses the transmitted information to determine whether to migrate at least one of the computational services and the data from the storage server from which the availability score is received to at least one other of the storage servers.

15. The system of claim 14 , wh

Assignees

• IBM

Inventors

• Andre Herve G P
• Carson Matthew D
• Chandra Rashmi
• Hardy Clint A
• Juarez Larry
• Leung Tony
• Sorenson Todd C

Classifications

• G06F11/2069

  Management of state, configuration or failover · CPC title

• G06F2201/805

  Real-time · CPC title

• G06F11/3034

  where the computing system component is a storage system, e.g. DASD based or network based (digital input from or digital output to record carriers G06F3/06; digital recording or reproducing G11B20/18; for distributed storage of data in networks, e.g. transport arrangements for network file system [NFS], storage area networks [SAN] or network attached storage [NAS], H04L67/1097) · CPC title

• G06F11/008 Primary

  Reliability or availability analysis · CPC title

• G06F11/2071

  using a plurality of controllers · CPC title