Self-managing systems that exist today have the ability to reduce the total cost of ownership of corporate IT systems. M GANESH takes stock of where autonomic computing technology stands today and where it's headed, while explaining how businesses can benefit from it

The line between fact and fiction is not as clear as it used to be. New generations of scientists and inventors keep making possible what was thought impossible just a few short years before.

And this is especially true in the information technology industry where the pace of innovation seems to be moving at the speed of light. Non-stop performance enhancements in chip speed, system reliability and even the creation of “intelligent infrastructure” are making technology more accessible to more people every day.

Ironically, this has led to a growing problem in the industry. As we get better and better technology with increasing price performance, managing those technologies has become a customer's number one problem. Some studies have shown that in five short years, given the growing shortage of trained systems administrators, the majority of corporations will not be able to manage their systems using the current computing technologies.

There is a solution. And this is going to sound like something out of Isaac Asimov's classic “2001” tale—the creation of computer systems that can manage themselves.

A leaf from Mother Nature
The best self-managing system the world has ever known is the human body. Our bodies autonomously perform myriad tasks daily to combat disease, repair wounds, convert food to energy, and basically, help us function on a day-to-day basis.
Without any conscious intervention of any kind, we breathe, fight infection, get fed with adrenaline when we are excited or threatened, and endorphins when we are happy. The multiple systems in the body—respiratory, circulatory, muscular, digestive, etc—work together in tandem to make all this possible.

This is what the computer industry is trying to create, in the form of self-managing computer systems. IBM’s eLiza is one such project.

The ultimate goal is to give businesses the ability to manage systems and technology infrastructures that are hundreds of times more complex than those in existence today, through what is also known as “autonomic computing”. This means the computer systems should be able to self-optimise, self-configure, self-protect and self-heal.

Self-managing systems
By creating e-business infrastructure that is autonomous and self-managing, companies will benefit in the following ways:

Self-optimisation - Improved resource management and automation capabilities:
Self-optimisation requires a system to efficiently maximise resource utilisation to meet the end user needs with no human intervention required. Today’s systems already include technologies like logical partitioning, dynamic workload management and dynamic server clustering. These capabilities are being extended across multiple heterogeneous systems to provide a single collection of resources to be managed by a single workload manager across the enterprise. This will allow the systems to be used optimally to meet end- user needs across the enterprise.

Self-configuring - The ability to configure the system on the fly:
Self-configuring means the ability for servers to define themselves “on-the-fly”. New features, software and servers can be dynamically added to the enterprise infrastructure with no disruption of services, and with minimum human intervention. Self-configuring also means that servers within the enterprise will “configure themselves” into the enterprise's e-biz infrastructure.

Self-healing - Repair problems online:
For a system to be self-healing, it must be able to recover from a failing component by first detecting and isolating the failed component, taking it offline, fixing or isolating the failed component, and reintroducing the fixed or replacement component without any application disruption. The self-healing objective is to minimise outages, keeping enterprise apps up and available at all times.

Self-protecting - Defend against unauthorised access:
Self-protecting systems provide the ability to define and manage the access from users to all the resources within the enterprise, protect against unauthorised resource access, detect intrusions and report these activities as they occur, and provide backup/recovery capabilities which are as secure as the original resource management systems.

Is it available today?
The quest to build the ever- more intelligent and self-managing system is an ongoing one. However, various examples of self-managing technologies already exist today and are in use by organisations around the world. IBM has customers using self-optimising technology from Project eLiza, ensuring that requirements for continuous uptime are met. Other customers, for whom security is paramount amidst large transaction volumes, utilise Project eLiza’s self-protecting technology.

Self-managing systems that exist today have the ability to reduce the total cost of ownership of corporate IT systems and optimise the use of its limited IT personnel resources through smarter, tougher infrastructure solutions.

The best is yet to come as the competitive forces in the technology industry drive each vendor to push the envelope ever further in the quest to build more and more intelligent infrastructure, at better price performance year-after-year. The ultimate—and certain—winners will be the customers.

M Ganesh is country manager for the Enterprise Systems Group at IBM India Ltd.