Project profile: gSLM
Owen Appleton unveils the grid Service Level Management project
Service Level Management (SLM) is the set of processes used in the commercial sector to agree upon, define and manage a service. Now gSLM, a new project funded by the European Commission, is bringing this approach to the grid.
Grids are as much a social as a technological feat, gathering together scientists worldwide to enable new kinds of research. While IT experts have shaped the technical side of the grid, its social element was strongly influenced by the culture of collaboration within the particle physics community. This informality has also extended to many of the agreements between the mostly academic organisations participating in the grid. While this may have helped the technology get off the ground, as official or legal agreements would have been harder to agree on, it increasingly seems to be unsustainable.
The grid is increasingly used in commercial and ‘mission-critical’ areas such as data processing for the Large Hadron Collider, and the lack of more formal agreements between grid participants has become an issue. Users are not generally interested in hearing about SLM, but they are concerned when a service is unavailable. As the commitment of user communities has become key in justifying Europe’s e-Infrastructure, they need to be able to rely on a certain level of service to justify moving to the grid. SLM is needed to be able to make these promises to users, as well as to make the agreements between providers that underpin them.
Several grid projects have tried to develop Service Level Agreements (SLAs), the contracts used to define a service between a provider and customer, but with mixed success. Other projects such as SLA@SOI have worked on SLAs in the broader area of service-orientated infrastructures but gSLM focuses more specifically on issues related to grids.
The project will bring together grid experts with IT to ‘port’ service management techniques to the grid. It will run a series of workshops to get input from both communities, which will then be used to generate and refine a roadmap for the improvement of grid service level management.
The first gSLM workshop will be at a major global IT Service Management event, the IM2011 to be held in Dublin, Ireland (23-27 May). The gSLM event will form part of the workshop on Business Driven IT Management, and will present the problem of grid SLM and seek SLM experts willing to contribute. The project would also welcome the participation of grid experts at the event, though later workshops will be more specifically tailored to the grid community.
Despite its grid focus, gSLM will also generate results of interest to the broader European e-Infrastructure. As hybrid or multi-cloud solutions become popular, the management of service agreements across multiple administrative and technological domains can only become more relevant.
