CSR---VCM: Autonomic Mechanisms for Reducing System Downtime due to Maintenance and Upgrades

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The project investigates and develops autonomic mechanisms for reducing system downtime due to software maintenance and upgrades. The project addresses operating system upgrades and also application upgrades, focusing on standalone binary-executable applications. The main goal is to lessen the possibility that patches and updates will ``break'' expected functionality of the environment that worked fine together with the old version -- overall maximizing availability and reliability both during and after maintenance while imposing little management overhead. The contributions stem primarily from a virtualization architecture that decouples application instances from operating system instances, enabling either to be independently updated. The results, disseminated via web download, will improve availability of legacy applications, with no source code access, modification, recompilation, relinking or application-specific semantic knowledge, and perform efficiently and securely on commodity operating systems and hardware.