"The challenge in the data center is to make better use of all of those devices that we bought during the heyday, when acquisitions were easy, when money was flush," says Vernon Turner, an analyst and group vice president for IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher). "Now we’re in a situation where we don’t have the money, but we have to provide the same amount of service. We don’t have the resources to do that, so by far the easiest route is to automate as much of that function as possible."

On the other hand, no self-respecting CIO would hand over the whole data center to an unproven autonomic solution. "It’s like HAL, where the data center has a mind of its own?and maybe ends up setting up an Internet gambling site," jokes Huw Morgan, CTO of Canadian service provider Bell Globemedia, which is currently evaluating Think Dynamics’ ThinkControl software. In fact, Globemedia and other early adopters, such as IT outsourcing company InFlow, plan to roll out autonomic solutions incrementally, outside the production infrastructure.

Terraspring’s CTO Ashar Aziz notes that in addition to the production infrastructure, there are many "shadow infrastructures" to consider. He takes the example of financial services companies, many of which have recently upped their IT budgets in only one area?disaster recovery. If a company has 50 servers in production and 50 in disaster recovery, IT should be able to commandeer the redundant infrastructure for such noncritical applications as quality assurance or staging. "Should a disaster occur," says Aziz, "you simply load the disaster recovery template for that infrastructure, and you’re ready to go. It’s a great way to leverage wartime assets in peacetime, because wartime is a rare event."

On a nuts-and-bolts level, those changes in data center personality amount to automated server provisioning. For example, an autonomic data center might respond to a surge in Internet traffic by grabbing servers from the application tier and reprovisioning them as frontline Web servers?automatically loading them with all the software necessary for their new role. "This is what autonomic computing is really about," says IDC’s Turner. "It’s about the ability to provision resources." Last year, IBM unveiled a technology demo dubbed Project OcŽano, in which a farm of Linux servers showed off automated provisioning capabilities.

Quick provisioning is a big selling point for Ed Denison, former director of global operations for outsourcing giant Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC). Denison likes the speed with which Terraspring’s software can respond to trouble and build a new server from scratch. In a demo Denison does for customers, "I tell the guy to pull any cable he wants. Before we can get back to the room where the screen is up, the pager on my belt goes off. And by the time we get back, the guy doing the demonstration has already queued up the replacement server and is probably five minutes into reinitializing it."