Oasis: Executing Autonomic Policies  

Oasis Policy Execution Environment
The Oasis™ Policy Execution Environment is an enterprise-scale orchestration engine that provides unparalleled visibility into deployed Autonomic Policies. This “run-time” environment allows for real-time examination of active policies and includes the ability to pause, modify and resume a policy, enabling quick recovery from failure conditions.

Key features and capabilities of the Execution Environment include:

Run-time Interaction
The most often cited obstacle to automation, and thus Autonomic Policy Management (APM), is the inability to specify all possible conditions and associated responses when creating a policy; in other words, automating the “unknowns” in an environment. Inevitably, there will be information needed to complete the execution of a policy that will not be known until runtime. Also, new environments and unknown conditions can create scenarios that were never envisioned when the policy was being originally defined. The Oasis Run-Time Interaction feature addresses this issue via two very unique capabilities: Run-time Visibility and Run-time Modification.

• Run-time Visibility
  Allows unparalleled run-time observation where users can visually assess the state of the operations in an executing policy. If additional information is required, then this capability allows the policy owner to drill down into each operation and see all the relevant environmental information.
• Run-time Modification
  Allows the policy owner to use this information in real-time to specify the new or modified operations that need to take place in order to complete the execution of the policy and/or evolve the definition of the policy.
  

Adaptive Local Monitoring
The Oasis TouchPoint is able to monitor for conditions independent of third-party monitoring tools. This capability is essential for implementing APM. Controlled by state-based policies, the Oasis TouchPoint is instructed to monitor for predefined conditions on a dynamic basis. The Oasis TouchPoint adapts its profile to monitor only for those conditions identified by policies and only when it makes sense to do so. The monitoring processes are detached from the central server and operate as independent processes, allowing for unparalleled scalability.

Intelligent TouchPoints
Oasis Intelligent TouchPoints are lightweight, secure multiplatform agents that perform adaptive monitoring, as well as task execution on the desired managed resources. Each TouchPoint contains a sensor that monitors state conditions and an effector that takes action based on conditions. The TouchPoints require minimal processing power, communicate over encrypted links, and can be deployed on Windows, UNIX, or Linux systems.

Resource Management
Oasis can synchronize different policies as needed or to limit the number of policies that are accessing a resource at one time.