From Here to Autonomy

How far away are we from this spectacular simplicity? That depends on how you define autonomic computing. IBM’s eLiza project encompasses everything from server hardware to self-healing databases to security management. Some of those elements, such as IBM eServers that detect and isolate bad memory chips, have already arrived, but the key software?IBM’s Enterprise WorkLoad Management (eWLM) suite?will remain in beta until next year. In any event, analysts agree that pulling such a wide range of IBM products into an organic, self-managing whole will take years.

The narrower definition of autonomic computing?put forth by such startups as PlateSpin, Sychron, Terraspring, Think Dynamics and others?addresses neither security nor vendor-specific hardware features, instead focusing on server provisioning and workload management that function across platforms. All these solutions, including IBM’s eWLM, share three characteristics: virtualization of resources, network monitoring and automated response to change based on rules established by data center administrators.

Rather than just virtualizing storage, autonomic solutions virtualize the whole infrastructure so that data center resources can be divvied up dynamically to meet the needs of applications. Autonomic systems will pool processing, memory, storage, bandwidth and so on, and then dole them out on the fly. In a sense, self-management software plays the role of a data center operating system, allocating the resources of the data center as if it were one big machine.

While data center virtualization is a fairly new concept, network monitoring?the input side of the autonomic computing model?is as old as the hills. In fact, autonomic solutions typically rely on data collected by such established products as HP OpenView or Tivoli Enterprise. "There are lots of ways of reading an environment to see if it’s broken," observes Al Wasserberger, CEO of Spirian, a software distribution company that also specializes in adding automatic deployment and self-healing capabilities to other companies’ software. "There are not very many ways of automatically fixing it so that it’s no longer broken." Whether self-healing or throwing computing power at needy apps, the capability of the data center to take action on its own?based on network monitoring data and rules set by administrators?forms the indivisible core of all autonomic solutions.

Autonomy Meets Reality

Every IT manager likes the idea of providing high service levels to the enterprise at a low cost and with far less maintenance hassle. That is especially true with data center utilization hovering at a remarkably low 20 percent, according to many analysts, mainly because those corporations must reserve significant capacity for disaster recovery or spikes in demand.