IBM Drives On-Demand Effort
Alan Ganek, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM, said his research team has developed a concept, dubbed "continuous control loops," that drives the autonomic computing architecture. Under the autonomic computing vision, systems and networks have the ability to self-heal and reallocate resources automatically as thresholds are reached. They also can allocate resources to reduce overall IT cost of ownership.
"We have a specification that describes the notion of an autonomic component and the management structure for it," he said. "It continually monitors the behavior of the component, analyzes what's going on, plans appropriate changes and drives execution around a consistent set of knowledge so that the various elements of the system are instrumented with sensors that [enable them to] be talked to in a uniform way," he said. "Then the architectural constructs start to put these autonomic managers together."
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IBM's Ganek says his team devised a core concept for autonomic computing.
IBM also recently submitted a standard logging data-capture format to the OASIS standards body. The format promises to improve the way systems are debugged and, ultimately, self-healed, Ganek said.
Several ISVs,including Peregrine Systems and Opalis,are working with IBM to advance the autonomic computing concept. Some of the vendors are incorporating the IBM format into the next versions of their software, an IBM spokesman said.
Opalis, a Toronto-based enterprise integration and automation software vendor, has been working on the system and network self-healing concept for some time. The company has developed an object-oriented automation and integration server called OpalisRobot that's based on event-driven workflow.
"Our mission is to reduce operational costs and increase the availability and performance of both networks and application systems," said Cynthia Weeden, Opalis' president. "Our vision is a data center that is completely autonomous with systems that are completely self-correcting. This was once referred to as the 'dark data center' but is now known as autonomic computing."