Oasis

Billed by the vendor as an Autonomic Policy Management platform, Oasis is targeted to IT personnel and provides for them the ability to automate policy-based actions across their Enterprise applications towards the goal of creating self-managing systems. The platform combines sensors and monitors, central policies, action definitions, a GUI-backed policy definition console, and an execution engine; allowing it to automatically respond to various events and situations based on definitions supplied by Enterprise technicians.

The platform consists of multiple components; and can, according to the vendor, support "...any number of various operating systems, databases, network equipment, or other elements." Encrypted communications are featured between all server/agent components; and the architecture is distributed such that failover is possible between redundant components and repositories.

The main components of the platform include:

- The Oasis Policy Builder, a GUI console that enables the creation/definition of policies. Such policies are created using the vendor's Declarative Policy technology, which allow personnel to describe the defined desired state of business applications and the actions to take when the application leaves that state without having to individually define to the system how to actually perform the measurements necessary to ascertain the system state. The Policy Builder itself includes separate components facilitating the creation of state based policies, schedule (time) based policies, and actual action plans that can be executed when the policies are triggered. Action plans can be executed as the result of links to state or scheduled policies, or other events and conditions.

- Oasis Policy Watch, which provides a real-time monitor for executing policies

- Oasis Orchestrator, which provides the execution engine for the action plans and communicates with the Touch Points.

- Oasis TouchPoints, which are deployed on top of each managed resource and provide both the dynamic sensor/monitoring logic for the determination of the resource's state; as well as an effector interface for the execution of defined actions. The vendor states that the TouchPoints are capable of monitoring only for those metrics necessary for the fulfillment of defined policies; and operate in parallel independently of the central server.

- The Oasis Autonomic Policy Library, a centralized repository of policies, action plans, data sets, sensor, and effector definitions. Features include support for role-based management (including the ability to define action triggers based on the crossing of ownership boundaries in a process), automated HTML-based documentation, and audit logging.

Other features of the platform include support for the automatic pausing of actions, enabling IT personnel to rectify potentially unknown conditions before allowing a process to continue; support for the run-time modification of policies; and support for both pre-built and customized sensor and effector operations (XML, SOAP, SNMP, SMTP, and CLI interfaces are available); support for infinite levels of policy nesting, as well as conditional logic, definition of resource and process interdependencies, variable passing, and human break points.

Oasis is available now. Visit the vendor's Web site for further information.