Tracking of physical locations

摘要

In a service provision environment where services may be provided from different physical computing resources (eg. data centres DC1-3 in fig. 1a), a user or client (51, 53 in figs. 1b & 3a) receives service source IP addresses in response to Domain Name Service requests and uses them to physically locate service sources (S1-S3) in terms of their originating data centres and the server racks (SR1-SRn, fig. 2b) and the individual servers (Svr 1-5) they comprise. A communication module (16, fig. 6) requests service location information via a query element (17) and a location identifier (18) retrieves the associated physical location by interrogating an IP address database. Load balancing and server reallocations between different data centres over time may also be indicated (fig. 5) and the history stored in a module (19, fig. 6). The location monitor (15) may operate under a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).