Autonomic computing, a phrase coined by IBM, describes technology that self-regulates and even heals itself much as the human body would do. "When I say technology, I’m including all of the software, all of the applications, all of the storage, all the pieces of the infrastructure," explains Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy for IBM’s server group. "Now, I don’t mean any far out AI project. What I mean is that...instead of the technology behaving in its usual pedantic way and requiring a human being to do everything for it, it starts taking care of its own needs."

According to Wladawsky-Berger, the mind-numbing complexity of today’s data centers makes the need for self-managing systems acute. At current growth rates, IBM projects that demand for skilled IT personnel will increase by more than 100 percent in the next six years?to the point where there simply won’t be enough available talent to maintain the infrastructure. To avert this Malthusian crisis, IBM launched its eLiza initiative last year, with the ongoing objective of spreading autonomic features across IBM’s hardware and software product lines. As these enhanced products roll out and begin working together, IBM declares that eLiza-enabled systems will display four distinct attributes: self-optimization, self-configuration, self-protection and self-healing.

But IBM is hardly the only company answering the need for self-managing systems. Its big hardware rivals have similar schemes: Hewlett-Packard touts its utility-based computing, while Sun Microsystems’ amorphous N1 initiative describes a computing environment free from the drudgery of manually allocating resources. And several startups, notably Terraspring and Think Dynamics, are already shipping solutions that monitor the data center and automatically provision servers and deploy applications.

"Autonomic computing is just the IBM term," says Duncan Hill, CTO of Think Dynamics. "There are a lot of terms out there that ultimately mean the same thing: Computing infrastructure that adapts to meet the demands of the applications that are running in it." In other words, IT develops and deploys applications, and the infrastructure more or less takes care of itself?adjusting automatically as applications and workloads change. The ultimate effect is not only less work but also much more effective utilization of data center resources.