Achieving self-management via utility functions

Self-management in accordance with high-level objectives that users can specify is a hallmark of autonomic computing systems. The authors advocate utility functions as a principled, practical, and general way of representing such objectives. In an effort to bring the promise of utility-based frameworks to the marketplace, they describe how they've implemented them in two commercial products to achieve efficient resource allocation in a prototype data center. They also address several challenges to commercialization stemming from the need to reconcile the two products' fundamentally different types of objectives. © 2007 IEEE.